Why Is There Religion?

0. Introduction

Religion is a fascinating subject.

Now, I am not religious, I am an atheist. To
most people, religion is a personal matter, and if there is any
fascination in it, it’s in the fulfillment they feel during the
moments they experience communication with supernatural beings.
But how can religion appear fascinating to a non-believer?

Why, of course religion is fascinating
even if you are not a believer, because it poses so many
interesting questions that — from an atheist’s point of view
— require an explanation: Why Is Religion Here? Why are people
religious? Why so many people are religious — why is
it the rule to be religious, and the exception to be an atheist?

Religious people would guffaw with my
naïveness.
“Why is there religion” — what a silly question! Only a
zany atheist would think of asking a question with a self-evident
answer: Because God is out there and made us so that we have
a knowledge of His existence, you fool! And some of us
revere Him, while some others, like you, have fallen into the
devil’s trap. It’s so simple!

But wait, I don’t
think it is so simple. For one thing, the three great
monotheistic religions that talk about a God who created
humankind (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) emerged only in the
last 4,000 years (the Jewish tribes are estimated to be at most
that old, see here). But do you know for how long we humans have existed
on this planet as the same species, Homo sapiens? For
approximately 150,000 years!(*) How can it be
that nobody was talking about God (the God) for tens,
and even hundreds of thousands of years? Yes, people have always
been religious, but what kind of religion did they have
for almost their entire existence? For nearly 150,000 years
there was no talk of God. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors
believed in ghosts and ancestor spirits. If religion is here
because of God, how could God allow this? What the heck was God
doing during all this time that we have been around, folks?
Please take a look at the following line, which shows (in blue
color on the left) the approximate length of time that we have
been on this planet without any notion of God as conceptualized
by the monotheistic trio, compared to the length of time that the
concept “God” started appearing in people’s minds (red
color, on the right):

In reality, even the above drawing is
flattering for monotheistic religions. The concept “God” did
not appear suddenly, full-fledged in people’s minds as we know
it today. The ancient Jewish God was very different from the one
of the modern times: he was an anthropomorphic God. He had a
thunderous voice, legs to walk with on the garden of Eden, and
other bodily parts that we don’t need to mention here, lest
some people might feel offended. The concept “God” evolved
in the minds of believers, until we reached the God-spirit of the
Christian religion in the last 2,000 years: a God who is
occasionally depicted and imagined as a respectful and healthy
Old Man; and
the Allah of the Islamic religion in the last 1,300 years, who
has no gender(*) and cannot be depicted at all. Also, humanity as a
whole did not switch to the notion “one God” suddenly, 4,000
years ago; the Jews were but a minute percent of the entire human
population (they still are), and it took the Christian religion
and its adoption in Europe, and a bit later the Islamic religion
and its adoption in the Arabic world, for the concept “one God”
to take off. Even today, people in the most populous nation,
China, do not believe in a monotheistic God, creator of the
universe. So, if religion is here because of God, then God has
created a peculiarly fragmentary and localized (both in space and
in time) image of himself in people’s minds. It’s a “God
with a thousand faces” that appears in the world. Why?

But my purpose is not to argue with the average believer.
For them, all questions are answered, all cases appear closed.
Believers usually enjoy staying in a tranquil state of mind, in which
questions of fundamental importance, such as whether God exists,
or whether there is an afterlife, are not asked at all. They
refuse to question the very foundations of their belief system,
and this is very understandable, because such questioning would
put in danger the entire edifice, which they don’t want to
shake and destroy. My purpose is to write down an explanatory
system for the phenomenon of religion primarily for myself,
because as a cognitive scientist I am very interested in
understanding how the mind works, and one important property of
human minds is their religious beliefs. But why did I write this
web page, if I am interested in an explanation for my own
satisfaction only? Because it is not productive to be talking to
oneself; I need to receive feedback, primarily from those few believers
who do not feel threatened by putting under the microscope of
reason even their most basic religious assumptions.

So, certainly, under the assumption that God
exists, there is hardly any question to be asked about the origin
of religion (save for the objections I presented earlier — see
the figure with the colored line, above — but the believer can
always cop out with a “God’s ways are mysterious” retort).
The question of the origin of religion becomes important only
under the assumption that God is a creation of the human mind.
If you are a believer and feel offended by this assumption, there
is always the Back button on your browser. If you are not
offended, you might either be a non-believer, or a believer who
simply is curious to see how an atheist would answer the question
of the origin of religion (for example, you might want to prepare
yourself and gather ammunition for the next occasion a
non-believer brings up this issue in a discussion). In any case,
assuming that I am not offending the reader, I proceed now to the
main topics of this text.

1. Explanations for
the Origin of Religion

1.1 Why Are People
Religious?

A
religious person would have the exact opposite question: why are
some people (like the author) non-religious?(*) But is the issue symmetric? Is a religious person as
much justified in asking this question, as the author is in
asking why so many people are religious? I will argue in this
section (§1) that the issue is not symmetric:

The normal
state of affairs is a mind free of religious thinking,
just as a normal body is one free of excessive weight.
Religion is something like fat: it’s an added
feature
that used to be useful for our survival in the past,
but now causes mostly harm to humankind.

However, the above analogy is not very accurate
because one can always opt to lose the excessive weight by going
on diet; but in the case of religion, there is no recipe to
follow to lose it, for two reasons: first, religious people do
not think there is something wrong with their religious beliefs,
or that their beliefs are causing harm to other people. And
second, there is a strong genetic factor in religion
(stronger than any genetic predisposition to acquiring weight),
which is an idea that will be discussed later (§3.2).

Religion is mainly a cognitive phenomenon, and
thus traditional evolutionary approaches fail to shed light to
all of its aspects. This is not to say that biology has no useful
information to give us for a deeper understanding of religion.
For example, as Frans de Waal[1] and Marc Hauser[2] tell us in
their recent publications, the core of the sense of morality that
almost all humans share has a biological foundation: other
primates may not have to decide on issues such as abortion and
euthanasia, but they do have to deal with stealing and murder on
a regular basis. (This subject will be developed further in the
section on the origins of morality, see §2.1.)
Indeed, a comparison of our cognitive abilities with those of
other animals will help us understand the basis of the answer to
the question “Whence Religion”. This is what I discuss next.

Try to put yourself in the mental position of an adult chimpanzee
who has just witnessed the death of an elder family member. Do
you think you would be able to entertain the following thought?

“This elder chimp just died;
in fact, all chimps die, sooner or later;
I am one of them; so one day I will die, too, sooner or later.”

No, you wouldn’t. To put it simply, you
wouldn’t have the mental capacity to make the above complicated
thought. Some pieces of the thought would be reachable (“This
elder chimp just died”, “I am one of them” — though they
wouldn’t be expressible in such linguistic terms, of course),
but others would be completely beyond your mental horizon (“all
chimps die”, “so one day I will die, too”). Your basic mental
handicap as a chimp (or as any other non-human animal for that
matter), is that you cannot conceive of the notion of “remote
future”. Only humans can do that.(*) Not all future would be inaccessible to you — for
example, you would be able to hide a piece of food from your
peers, knowing that you would be able to retrieve it soon, maybe
even in a few days. But you wouldn’t be able to think of a
future that extends beyond a few days ahead. You wouldn’t
understand what “in a few years” means. Thus you couldn’t
possibly ever fear your own death.

The fear of death can be lessened and thus become bearable
with the belief in an afterlife, which assures the believer that death is not
the end of it all. As we will see in §1.1.1
(immediately below, criticizing Pascal Boyer’s book “Religion Explained”),
practically all religions and metaphysical belief systems either promise an
afterlife, or directly imply its existence. Thus, religion plays the role of a
strong painkiller against the psychological stress caused by the fear of
death.

The fear of death is just one psychological burden that we humans
alone have to carry on our shoulders throughout our lives.
Another is the fear of the contingencies of our hostile
environment. Right now most of us (and especially those of us who
have access to a high-tech information medium such as the
Internet) feel completely secure, reading as we are the present
text. I can bet all my money that you are not thinking of the
wall possibly collapsing and killing you before you finish
reading this paragraph. But our ancestors did not evolve in such
secure environments, but in ones where any life-threatening
situation could happen at any time. They felt that the
contingencies of life, especially the damaging and hurtful ones,
required an explanation. In reality, there is no explanation for
why some person appears unfortunate.(*) But the human mind is designed to seek an explanation,
and if one is difficult to find, it will stick to something,
some idea that appears as an explanation. So our ancestors, for
tens of thousands of years, believed that misfortunes are caused
by evil ghosts, spirits, and vengeful dead ancestors (who were
assumed to be around, invisible to the living people). Recently (at most in the
last 4,000 years only), the notion of “Evil” was personified
and attributed to one agent, the Devil; similarly, the notion of
“Good” was also personified and concentrated on a single
agent, God.(*) But this is a very recent (relatively speaking, see the
introduction) development. Thus, the explanation of nature’s
capricious character (floods, earthquakes, wild animals, personal
disasters, etc.) was another factor in helping us to develop
religious beliefs. God, or gods, was the last resort of the
unfortunate person. It is widely known that during the time of
personal misfortune, or of impending disaster, people implore for
divine help and intervention.

Related to the
explanation for misfortune and disasters, though of lesser
importance, is the need for an explanation of how the world came
to be. It should be mentioned that because this need is not of
vital importance, we do not encounter creation myths in all of
the world’s religions. They do appear in many,
however.(*) The human mind is filled with awe when observing the
intricate structure of the natural world, and seeks an
explanation for it: someone must have ordered this
chaos. Religions (at least some of them) can play the role of “layman’s
philosophy” when they include creation myths.

Religion also has an important function, which does not explain
directly why we are religious, but is indirectly related
to the origins of religious behavior: religion, at least in its
recent institutionalized form, is a way to impose social
order. Until quite recently in Western Europe (before the
acceptance of secularism), non-compliance with the religious
order might spell even the death of the individual. This is still
(early 21st C.) the case in some Islamic nations, such as Iran
and Saudi Arabia, the judicial system of which is regulated by
the sharia (Islamic law). However, religion was not
institutionalized during most of the time of its presence (see
the blue part of the line of the figure at the top of this page).
Still, non-compliance with religious rules was usually
discouraged either mildly, or compulsively. The biologist Eugene
O. Wilson suggested that the enforcement of religion, i.e., the
need to “stay with the group/tribe”, is one of the forces
that selected for religious minds, and in particular, for obedient
minds: those individuals who could tolerate without questioning
the nonsense that came out of the mouth of the religious leader
(the shaman, who was usually also the tribal leader), could gain
better share of the resources of the tribe (food, social care,
etc.), and thus produce more offspring than the others, the
mavericks, who, questioning the leader’s authority, would be
ousted from the community. Thus we have a proposal for the explanation of why the
religious mind is generally not bothered by contradictions,(*) and is willing to accept the illogical ideas believed
by religious peers, especially the nonsense that sometimes comes
from religious authorities.(*)It should also be noted that
the anthropologist and cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer argues
persuasively that the more incredible the religious belief is,
the better it qualifies as a religious belief.[3] (The introductory chapter of Boyer’s book is also
examined immediately below.) In summary, the need to comply to
religious rules, no matter how irrational, could be an
explanation of how religion was hardwired in human brains. Of
course, as in every statistical argument, this does not mean that
everyone would have to be religious; only that on
average, people tend to be born with a predisposition for
religion, rather than an aversion to it. Given suitable societal
inputs, the person born with such a proclivity will become
religious, usually following the dominant denomination of his/her
society.

1.1.1 Pascal
Boyer’s “Religion Explained”

The American cognitive scientist Pascal
Boyer, who teaches at
the Psychology and Anthropology departments of
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri,
essentially rejects all the above reasons as
explanations for the origin of religion in his book Religion
Explained,[3] in
chapter one. For each one of the above explanations,
Boyer finds one or more religions for which the
explanation does not hold. So he concludes that this
cannot be a universal explanation. For example,
regarding the mortality and “fear of death”
problem, Boyer says:

“[W]e must [...] discard the
parochial notion that religion everywhere
promises salvation, for that is clearly not the
case.” (p. 21)

Yes, but the world’s 2.1 billion
Christians, and 1.5 billion Muslims, or a combined
54% of the world’s religious population (see source of these statistics) do believe in
afterlife and salvation. Many ancient religions
supported the notion of afterlife, too. The Greeks
believed that souls go to the underworld, ruled by
the god Hades. Romans believed essentially the same,
calling the god Pluto.

Even most of the religions that Boyer
thinks provide counter-examples, are actually examples
of the afterlife belief: every religion that refers to ancestor
spirits, for instance, explicitly points to the idea of
afterlife: “When I die, I will be a dead ancestor of my
living descendants, and my soul might stay around, just as my
own ancestors’ souls are around now.” Salvation,
which Boyer focuses on, might indeed be parochial. But what
nurtures the human psyche with courage is not the particular
idea of salvation, but the more general one of afterlife,
the hope that death is not the end of it all.

A closer examination of the world’s
religions reveals that in essentially all of them, people
believe in some form of afterlife: setting aside the
well-known beliefs about paradise and hell of Christians and
Muslims, the 900 million Hindus believe in reincarnation;
~400 million Buddhists also believe in cycles of rebirth, and
the eventual attainment of bodhi (“enlightenment”, i.e.,
becoming buddha); similar beliefs are held by another ~400
million of Chinese traditional religion (a blend of Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Taoism). If we add to this the ancestor
worship of Japanese Shintoism and various African, Indian
American, and Aboriginal Australian religions, one wonders,
just what is the percent of people who can be called
religious and do not believe in some form of
afterlife. Such religions, if they exist, must be really
parochial.

Even the idea that religions provide
explanations is a nonstarter for Boyer. He claims that each
religious “explanation” results in creating more
questions than the ones it originally set out to explain. For
example:

Consider the explanation of thunder as
the booming voice of ancestors who express their anger
over some human misdemeanor. This, Boyer says, creates
all sorts of questions: Where are those ancestors? Why
can’t they be seen? By what means does the noise come
from the distant place where they live? How do they
produce the noise, do they have a special mouth? Are they
gigantic? On the other hand, says Boyer, people
understand the concept of explanation very well. So it
can’t be that they bring up the religious idea as an
explanation; it must be for some other reason, or reasons
(pp. 10-18).

I beg to disagree. In Boyer’s mind
(as well as in mine, by the way), perhaps it’s true that
religious attempts to explain a phenomenon create more
questions than the ones they originally set out to explain.
But in the believer’s mind the explanations are
perfectly fine, because further questions are not
formed. Even if someone (a non-believer) asks such questions
explicitly, the believer will perceive them as ridiculous,
not worthy at all to be asked. An example, quite familiar to
many people, will help illustrate this point:

Suppose I ask a believer of one of the
three major monotheistic religions, “Who created the world?”
Immediately, I’ll receive the explanation: “But of
course, God created it.” But then suppose I try to point
out that this doesn’t sound good as an explanation of the
existence of the world, because it creates more questions
than the one it was supposed to answer. For example, who
created God? To this, the believer has a ready-made answer:
“Nobody created God, because God has existed forever.”
But, I would insist, how do we know this? How can we be sure
that God has existed forever and was not created by another
hyper-God? Then again, suppose God has existed forever; why
did he create our universe at that particular
moment? How can a Mind wait for an infinity before
creating something? What does it mean to wait for an
infinity? Does this imply that God keeps creating universes
eternally? If not, why did God create only one universe? If
yes, what does he do with those other universes? Does he
purge them, do they die naturally? Do some of them keep
existing in parallel with ours? Why did God create
our universe? Does he get a kick out of this business, or
does he have some ultimate purpose? The
average believer will miss the notion that, in an effort to
give an explanation, a large number of other questions are
introduced because of the God-as-creator hypothesis.

No, the average believer does not
understand the notion “explanation” the same way Boyer
understands it (which, as I said, agrees with my
understanding of it). What Boyer has in mind is the “axiomatic
theory-like” explanation: one that questions its
assumptions, and proceeds backwards answering all newly
created questions with further explanations, until it hits
rock-bottom, stopping at the “axioms” of the theory. If
such axioms can be conventionally accepted (e.g., by direct
observation, to the best of our current abilities), fine, we
have a scientific theory. If the axioms are arbitrary, not
amenable to scientific verification (e.g., “God exists”),
then we have an arbitrary theory. But no layperson, lacking
training in mathematics, logic, and proof theory, thinks of
this kind of explanation when using the word “explanation”.
For most people, an explanation such as “God did it” is
perfectly self-sufficient. So, yes — contrary to what Boyer
thinks — most religions provide explanations to most
people. Here is what Boyer says (p. 14, his emphasis):

“If we say that people use religious
notions to explain the world, this seems to
suggest that they do not know what a proper explanation
is. But that is absurd. We have ample evidence that they
do know.”

He does not proceed to tell us what this
“ample evidence” is, but he describes the above as “a
paradox familiar to all anthropologists”. I would agree it
is a paradox if by the word “explanation” the average
person understood the same notion of axiomatic theory-like
explanation as Boyer and I understand. But they don’t. On
the contrary, people resort to bogus explanations all the
time, such as that their bad luck was caused by a black cat
that they happened to come across some time ago (a belief
held in Greece, Turkey, and other Balkan and Middle Eastern
countries); or that their going to a trip this year was
caused by their running around the block carrying an empty
suitcase on the 1st of January (a belief held in Colombia);
or that two people are good friends because one was born in
the year of the monkey and the other in the year of the
dragon (Chinese and East Asian); or that some unfortunate
event was associated with the number 13 in one way or another
(Western); or that a person’s luck depends on the positions
of the planets and stars (Western); or that a person’s
health improved because some crystal (a stone) was rubbed
over the person’s chest (an idiocy of global range). We
usually call all these beliefs not religious, but superstitious.
However, such beliefs are characteristic of what people can
accept as “explanation” and cause-and-effect relation.
People can believe trash. There is ample evidence, one doesn’t
need to be a cognitive scientist to see it. Unfortunately,
“politically correct” anthropologists may deny it. You
see, if you are a politically correct anthropologist or
sociologist, you might wish to deny that people can be fools.
But if you do so, then you are not a scientist. With science
we learn not what we wish to find, but what our disinterested
methods (our instruments, math tools, etc.) tell us that
there is.

Still in
the context of explanations, Boyer attacks a 19th century
anthropology movement called intellectualism.
According to it, if a phenomenon is common in human
experience and people do not have the conceptual means to
understand it, then they will try and find some speculative
explanation.(*)

Boyer thinks
a general statement such as the above is “plainly false”,
and, to show why, he brings up the question of how our
thoughts (an immaterial entity) manage to interact with the
physical world, and cause, for example, our arms to move.
This, he says, “is a difficult problem for philosophers and
cognitive scientists(*) ... but
surprisingly enough, it is a problem for nobody else in the
entire world.”

Exactly. This observation should tell
something to good professor Boyer. Why are people not
interested in coming up with an explanation — not even a
bogus one — for this problem? Why only philosophers and
cognitive scientists see it as a problem, but the average
folk cannot care less?

Obviously, because this problem is not one
that has any consequence for people’s lives. In contrast,
natural phenomena that have been given bogus explanations
have had immediate effects, sometimes devastating, in people’s
lives. If it rained for a whole week, and the rivers flooded
— as it happens every so often in some part of the world
— and the whole land in which you lived in prehistoric
times was covered with waters, as far as you could see and as
far as anyone you know could see, and if many, or most, of
your loved ones perished during the event, this would have a
devastating effect in your life, and engrave a deep groove in
your tribe’s collective memory. You would feel the need to
understand why; you would probably ask — nay, shout loudly
— WHY did this happen to us? Why were we
destroyed? The bogus explanation can differ from culture to
culture. The Greeks, for example, thought that Zeus decided
he had failed with his original experiment at constructing
the human psyche, and wanted to start all over, so he flooded
the world; the Jews believed that God was angry with people’s
moral behavior. Whatever the explanation, people felt the
need to explain. Is this comparable in any way with the “problem”
of how our immaterial thoughts manage to interact with and
move material objects? Of course no normal person will
perceive this as a question to be answered at all: who cares!

If we examine the nature of the problems
that were given religious (bogus) explanations, we realize
that they all had immediate impact on people’s lives. The
rainbow appears during a time of change between inclement and
calm weather; it signifies a state of flux in the weather, so
naturally it’s a candidate for a bogus explanation. Not
many cultures tried to explain the rainbow, actually; I am
aware of only the Jews, who thought it was God’s sign of
the coming peace in weather conditions. This suggests that
the importance of a natural phenomenon in people’s lives
might be correlated with the number of cultures that
attempted to explain it. Other events, more important, were
“explained” by more cultures. The thunder, lightning, and
thunderbolts, had more direct effects than the rainbow —
people and their livestock were getting killed — therefore,
more cultures associated such events with a god’s wrath
about something or someone. The mountains played a major role
in ancient people’s lives, determining the extent to which
they could expand their agriculture and animal husbandry, and
the regions from where enemy tribes could not attack them.
Therefore, mountains required an explanation, or at least a
creator. Why were they there? The Jews thought God made them
(for no apparent reason), but the Muslims went a step further: they thought
Allah placed them like pegs holding a tent, to prevent the
earth from shaking.(*) Rivers were
important for similar reasons, and the more important role
they played (e.g., the Nile in Egyptian life; Euphrates and
Tigris in Mesopotamia), the more likely it was that they
would be explained as personified deities. Conversely, the
sea didn’t play much of a role in ancient Jews’ lives, so
it was just a “thing”, one of the many that God created,
but for seafaring peoples such as Greeks and Romans, it was
personified by a deity (Oceanos/Oceanus), and powerful gods
were thought to live in it (Poseidon / Neptune, Triton, the
Nereids, and more).

So, if anthropological intellectualism is
expanded to include even yawn-inducing “problems”, such
as how thoughts move objects, of course it is wrong. But, in
my understanding, intellectualism merely says that
traditionally people have sought to explain issues that
appeared important to them, and they did so without regard to
the plausibility of the explanation, or its agreement with
observation, or the number of additional questions that it
creates. Any odd explanation, be it of religious or
superstitious nature, seems equally good. I don’t see how
one can reject this statement. The evidence is not just
ample, but overwhelming.

Similarly, Boyer rejects other arguments
explaining religion by pointing to some religion for
which the explanation fails. And thus, since none of these
explanations holds in 100% of the cases, he proceeds in the
following chapters to vindicate the title of his book: “Religion
Explained”. This is a really good book (even if a bit
austere in style), and I recommend it to the interested and
patient reader. But in its first chapter, Boyer, as a good
American, falls into his culture’s trap: he wants total
explanations, ones that work in 100% of the cases. Either
something explains everything, or it explains
nothing, he thinks. (Black-and-white thinking is a typical
attribute that pervades the American culture.(*)) He wants the magic solution that will explain
everything. Why is this a feature of his culture? Consider
this example: It is known that Americans are getting fatter
and fatter. Whereas other people grow vertically because of
better nutrition, Americans keep growing horizontally. This
is a problem, and many Americans perceive it as such. But
instead of doing what common sense suggests, namely, to
consume less quantity and better quality of food (fewer
fast-food products, fewer junk snacks, and drink water for
Pete’s sake, instead of their famous national sugary
drink), their scientists want to find the magic chemical
ingredient that, when taken (in the form of a pill, for
example), will allow them to hold on to their eating habits
(which means eating like elephants), and still keep in
perfect shape. This inanity requires a sociological and
anthropological explanation, but here I only want to point
out that Boyer’s attitude towards explanations is typically
American: instead of admitting the totality of explanations
for the existence of religion as a whole, he observes that
none of them works as a magic ingredient that explains
everything, so he rejects them all.

1.2 Darwinian
Explanations

Every specialist tends to see the world through
the spectacles of their own area of interest. The theologian will
find religious implications in any given aspect of nature, the
artist will marvel at and be inspired by it, and attempt to
represent it in an artistic medium, and the biologist will try to
outline a Darwinian (evolutionary) explanation for it. Religion,
as an aspect of (human) nature, is no exception: biologists have
proposed evolutionary explanations for the emergence of religion
in humankind. These will be briefly discussed below.

Religion, from a biological point of view,
appears on the surface just as puzzling as the tail of a male
bird of paradise: so cumbersome that it becomes dangerous for the
survival of its holder. A male bird of paradise rises with
difficulty from the ground, given the weight of its long tail
feathers, thus becoming easier to capture by predators.
This disadvantage is more than compensated, however, by the appeal that such
fancy tail has to the female bird. Similarly, possessing religion can be dangerous for the
individual: religious human sacrifice was practiced regularly
until our recent past (well into the historical times) as a means
to pacify some nonexistent entity, a god, or gods, i.e., ideas in
the minds of religious people. The mythologies and legends of
various cultures describe such stories of human sacrifice. In The
Iliad, Iphigenia, the virgin daughter of the king-leader of
the Greeks, Agamemnon, is sacrificed on the altar in order to
appease the gods so that they send propitious winds that can set
the Greek fleet in motion, to sail against Troy. In the story,
goddess Artemis is supposed to intervene at the last moment,
replacing Iphigenia with a deer. This story is repeated in two
versions in the Jewish Bible: one in which the sacrificial
victim, boy Isaac, is replaced at the last moment by a ram
through an act of God before being slain by his father Abraham,
and another one in which a virgin girl is actually sacrificed by
her father, who believed that God helped him to become victor in
a battle (thus he offered his daughter as a thank-you present to
God; more details to follow later on). Even though these
are just mythological descriptions, it is reasonable to assume
that they echo actual ancient customs and practices. Evidence of
real human sacrifice has been found among native American
cultures of Central America (Aztecs, Mayas) and South America
(Incas), always as part of religious rituals. Even non-human
sacrifice, i.e., the concept of wasting resources (food) to
appease gods, works against survival. The counter-argument is
that the notion of sacrifice was developed only after our
ancestors passed from the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence to
farming, which provided surplus resources, making possible (or
even necessary) the idea that some of them could be wasted. But
religion can be detrimental to health not only due to sacrifice.
At the time of this writing, there are frequent reports of suicide
bombers in the Muslim world: people who arm themselves with explosives and
detonate them in order not only to exterminate their enemies, but
also to reach their creator and thus live blissfully and
eternally after their suicide — at least that’s what they believe. In
earlier, pre-farming times, a person concerning him/herself with
religion would be wasting precious resources and energy in
activities that fail to fill an empty stomach. But every
seemingly burdensome feature, be it the tail of the male bird of
paradise or religious activities of human beings, must have some
non-obvious advantages that compensate for the losses. What are
the biological advantages of religion?

Since we are looking for evolutionary
explanations, we must consider religion not as it mostly appears
now, but as it used to be during most of our existence as a
species. (This issue will be further developed here.)
The following evolutionary explanations have been proposed:

It has been suggested that a person who would trust the shaman’s
ability to cure, would have some chances to really be cured in
some cases by means of the placebo effect, i.e., the power of
suggestion. But in order for the placebo effect to work, one must
have blind faith to the shamanic practices and wisdom. Thus the
people who could show a blind faith to the authority of the
shaman stood better chances to be cured.[6] It should be noted that we shouldn’t expect all illnesses to be
curable by the placebo effect to have an evolutionary advantage. Even a tiny
improvement in some characteristic, or ability, becomes important in the
propagation of genes for statistical reasons (beyond the scope of this text
to explain). Thus, even if some people can be cured by the placebo
effect in a minority of illnesses, that is sufficient to count as an
evolutionary advantage.

Together with blind faith to shamanic authority also
came the ability to shut down the faculty of logic (to be
examined later on), because it really takes some special ability to
sincerely believe that the spells, dances, and rituals of the
shaman will have some beneficial effect on one’s health. Thus, obedient members of the tribe benefit by receiving
resources from the group, whereas the disobedient ones are ostracized, lose
contact with the group and hence access to the resources. Thus
they have fewer chances to have descendants and propagate their
genes, including those genes that led them to live away from the
tribe (E. O. Wilson).

Others see the benefit not only to
the individual, but also to the entire group of people who share
common beliefs. Thus, common beliefs would help strengthen the
cohesion of the group, making its members more determined to fight and protect
each other, thus helping the group survive better than other
groups that did not show such cohesion. Among the
proponents of the controversial theory of group selection are the
Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew, and the American biologist
David Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral.[14]

Other biologists see religion not as benefiting
the individual, but as a byproduct of some other important
biological or psychological property. The British biologist
Richard Dawkins, for example, proposes (without insisting that
this must be the definitive explanation) that religious feelings
are feelings that start during childhood as obedience to the
authority of the parents, and later, in adulthood, misfire and
become feelings of obedience to an image of a fatherly and loving
God.[13] Undoubtedly, children have evolved to trust their
parents’ advice without questions. (Those children who did not,
had fewer chances to survive and have descendants.) Once the idea
“Trust authority without questions” is established in a young
mind, it becomes deeply ingrained, and it later misfires by
trusting the authority of the tribal elders, priests, and the “ultimate
parent”, God. Although this idea is interesting, one wonders,
couldn’t humans evolve so as to lose the ability to blindly
trust authority as adults, just as children lose their ability to
learn natively languages later in life? But still, Dawkins
proposes this as a possibility only: as an example of how
religious feelings could be the byproduct of some other function
of the human intellect.

Personally, I find evolutionary arguments weak if their
purpose is to explain religion in its entirety. The reason is that, although
religion might have started as a primarily biological phenomenon with
evolutionary advantages, it turned into (should I say “evolved”? — but in the
wider sense) a primarily cognitive phenomenon. Thus, biological evolution
is insufficient as an explanatory device for religion, unless we restrict
ourselves to the times of hunter–gatherers, shamans, beliefs in ancestor
spirits, etc., and forget about paradise and hell, churches, mosques, rabbis,
priests, imams, popes, ayatollahs, prayers, masses, holy inquisitions, crusades,
missionaries, fundamentalists, holy books, and all the rest of paraphernalia
that are the products of the development of human cognition, to which we
turn our focus in the next section.

1.3 Religion as a
Viral Meme

It has
been more than two decades since the idea that some of our
thoughts might be copied from mind to mind in an
evolutionary-like process first appeared in Dawkins’s seminal
work, The Selfish Gene.[4] Dawkins coined the term “meme” for any such
self-replicating idea (by analogy with the word “gene”), and
the term has stayed with us ever since (1976), as a new meme (the
“meme meme”). Dawkins also suggested, at the very end of his
book, that religion might be seen as a “viral” meme. This idea was developed
somewhat further in Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine.[5]To understand how a viral meme can commandeer a person’s
mind, allowing the person to believe that the person is
in control, it is useful to consider an analogy offered by the
philosopher Daniel C. Dennett at the very beginning of his recent
book, Breaking the Spell.[6] Dennett writes of an ant that exhibits a peculiar
behavior:

“You watch an ant in a meadow,
laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher
until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus
rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is
the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in
this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it
turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant. It is
not trying to get a better view of the territory or seeking
food or showing off to a potential mate, for instance. Its
brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet
fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum), that needs to get
itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to
complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is
driving the ant into position to benefit its
progeny, not the ant’s. This is not an isolated phenomenon.
Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among
other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave
in unlikely—even suicidal—ways, all for the benefit of
the guest, not the host.” (p. 3).

Dennett then goes on to compare the situation
of a mind of a religious person “taken” by religious memes,
to the situation of the brain of an ant that is similarly “taken”
by the parasitic genes. Dennett’s analogy should not be
construed too literally, of course. For example, the parasite Dicrocelium
dendriticum has a metabolism, so if it does not find a host
such as a sheep or cow to complete its life cycle, it will
presumably die. Not so with the religious memes (thoughts,
concepts), which lack metabolism, and can stay in the believer’s
mind indefinitely. But, just like the ant with the D.
dendriticum, a believer will engage in certain rituals (for
example, going to church every Sunday), over, and over, and over.
Again, the reader might object that the ant does the grass-blade
climbing ritual unthinkingly, whereas the believer goes
to church by his/her own free will (and would avoid going if
something urgent happened). Certainly, a human mind with a set of
religious memes is an immensely complex system. Dennett’s
analogy is not meant to belittle a religious mind, reducing it to
a mindless automaton, such as that of an ant’s. It does not
mean that a believer has the brain of an ant! (for Pete’s
sake, as someone complained to me; after all, if a believer is an
ant, we are all ants — including Dennett and this author!) The
analogy only points to the fact that a religious mind is a normal
mind plus some set of ideas (the religious memes), which
cause the believer to exhibit some behavioral patterns. One of
those patterns is that the believer will try (and usually
succeed) to convince his/her own children of the “truth” of
those religious memes, so that the memes will be transmitted to
the child; and so on, generation after generation. The believer
believes that the transmission is done by the believer’s own
free will. Fine. But an alternative viewpoint is that this is
only a cognitive illusion. After all, how many believers ever
thought, “No: I will not teach my own children
anything about my religion; instead, I will let them find out
about God by themselves.” Believers almost never entertain such
thoughts, so where is the “free will”? But even if an
occasional believer does entertain this thought,
religious memes are not passed only by parents to children, but
also by the social environment in which children grow up. To say
“I will not teach my children anything about my religion” is
like living in a house where every adult has the flu, and hoping
futilely that you won’t pass your viruses to your children if
you simply do not sneeze or cough in their face.

But there are other memes in people’s minds.
Why should only the religious ones be called “viral”? Why
should only they be denigrated with a label such as “virus-like”,
and not do the same for other memes, e.g., those that a
non-believer has regarding God’s non-existence? Why, isn’t an
atheist “taken” by the atheism memes?

Because there is an
important difference between memes and memes. The religious ones
“want”(*) to spread. To this end, religions traditionally
organize missions, sending their missionaries to places deemed
“ground suitable for sowing the word of God”. (Which means,
minds so weakly infected by other, feeble religious memes, that
the new and superior ones will spread like the plague — and
Churches are usually dead right.) Believers typically make
monetary contributions to such missions, considering it as one of
their religious duties. In contrast, non-religious memes do not
seem to have any “wish” to spread, and so they don’t even
qualify to be labeled as memes (a meme is an idea, or set of
ideas, that appears as if it wants to spread; other examples are
given below). Though religious missions are known since it was
financially feasible to organize them, I have yet to hear
of the first atheistic mission.(*) Atheists, agnostics, and other non-believers, do not
gather regularly at a place listening to the sermon of an atheist
priest. There
are no atheist temples, no rituals, no prayers, no priests, no
bishops, no missionaries, no holy scriptures, no donations for
the advancement of atheism in the world.(*)These
concepts are all attributes of religion, and that is why there is
an asymmetry between believing and not believing, and why
religious ideas qualify as memes, whereas their absence does not.(*)

Boy!... Does this Cameron character look like he
wants to sneeze his viral memes in your face?

Now, if a non-believer’s ideas do not even
qualify as memes, but religious ones do, why are the latter
labeled as “viral”? What are examples of non-viral memes?

Non-viral, or normal memes, are sets of ideas
that generally spread from person to person, but without causing
the mind that possesses them to engage in repetitious rituals,
nor wanting to pass them on to successive generations. For
example, a tune that plays in your mind and causes you to hum it,
sometimes for an entire day, could be called a meme. It is
transmitted by radio waves, electronically, optically (burned on
CD’s), or simply by listening to another person humming it. A
new trend in fashion would qualify as another meme, or complex of
memes. Certainly, such memes will cause you to exhibit some
behaviors (you might go to the music store to buy a CD, or to the
department store to buy a fashionable pair of shoes), but they
will not cause you to perform rituals, nor congregate with other
people to reinforce the rote learning of those rituals, nor
summon your child one day and tell him/her in a very solemn
voice, “Listen, sweetie: I want to talk to you about a very
important tune/fashion that there is in this universe, which I
would like you to remember/follow for the rest of your life.”

Are there any other viral memes, besides the
religious ones? I think so. Every ideology, every “-ism” that
involves a hierarchical organization with leaders and
subordinates, some text that spells the ideological principles,
gatherings in which rituals or near-rituals are performed,
fundraising campaigns, and propaganda for spreading the ideology
of “-ism”, including perhaps some magazine or newspaper
controlled by the top echelons of the organization, qualifies as
“viral” in my view. Followers of such ideologies generally
wish to see their children involved in the same organization
(i.e., be infected by the viral memes of the ideology). The
difference with religions is that the child’s environment
(e.g., school) is usually not contaminated by the same ideology,
so the viral infection is not as effective as in the case of a
religious doctrine. (Usually, but not always: communism would be
an example of an ideology with a complex of viral memes that
infested even the schools of societies that employed it as the
sole form of governance.)

Young students receiving Islamic
education in Afghanistan. (These come from pictures taken in the
summer of 2007,
but the originals are property of the Associated Press, so I did
some image filtering to avoid violating property rights.)

The above analogy of religious memes with viral
genes can be interesting for the non-believer, because it
provides a new perspective on religion, but might appear hostile,
even abominable to the believer. Objectively, the analogy misses
a crucial point: whereas biological viruses are often detrimental
for the health of infected individuals, religious memes must have
played a crucial and beneficial role in the evolution of our
species. Without them, we might not be around. This idea is
further developed in the sections that follow.

2. The Evolution of
Religion

When we think of “religion” today, we
usually have the present state of religion in the world, in our
minds. There are more than six billion people, and well-known
religions (e.g., those followed by over 100 million people)
account for around 80% of the entire population of Earth. (Source.) The indigenous tribes of Africa, the Americas, Asia,
and Australia, account for only 6% of the total today. But has
the situation always been like this? Could it be that we now
witness a very recent and rather atypical view of
religion? If we want to understand religion deeply, where it came
from, and what it meant to human beings throughout our existence,
instead of just how it appears now, we need to acquire a
clear picture of how people and their various religions changed
over the eons; in other words, how religion evolved in
time. Specifically, we need to know the answers for the following
questions:

For how long have we existed on this
planet?

Where did our species first appear?

How many individuals constituted our most
ancient ancestors?

When did our ancestors spread to different
places of the world?

How did the size of the human population
change over time?

By what time should they have started
developing religious concepts, and what kinds of
concepts might those be?

How did religions start taking their
present familiar form?

Note that, although — superficially — only
the last two questions appear to concern religion, it is wrong to
try to answer only them ignoring the rest, which are prerequisites
for properly understanding the answer for the last two quesions.
So let’s proceed, answering the above questions one by one.

The first
three questions are the easiest ones to answer, because data in
the form of fossil findings and DNA analyses have been
accumulating for some time, converging on roughly the same
conclusions.(*)

The age of our species seems to be anywhere between 200,000 and
100,000 years, with the number 150,000 as the best rough
estimate, if we insist to remember a single number. How do we end
up with these numbers?

Well, dating fossils has been done
since quite some decades ago, with the help of knowledge
from quantum physics. There are several methods. If the
age of a rock that can be two or three billion
years old is at question, some method must be used; but
if what is sought is the age of a fossil bone that can be
only a few tens of thousands of years old, then a
different method must be used. What happens is that when
the fossil is formed, some radioactive atoms (called “isotopes”)
are enclosed in it and become part of its structure. Over
time these atoms decay, turning to atoms of a different
element. For example, one common case is that atoms of
the isotope potassium-40 turn into atoms of the isotope
argon-40 over tens of thousands of years. By measuring
what percent of potassium-40 remains in the material
(comparing it with the percent that has turned into
argon-40) we obtain an estimate of the time that the
object remained at that state until it was found. This is
just one example of a method, and scientists often apply
more than one dating method independently, to arrive at
safe conclusions.

Examining the way our DNA changes is a
more recent method. Normally, when a child is conceived,
he or she inherits around half of the genes (half of the
DNA molecule) from each parent. However, always a few
random mutations (changes) occur in the DNA molecular
structure, so at the places where mutations happened the
child’s DNA looks like neither parent. Because such
mutations occur at a more-or-less predictable rate over
generations, by comparing the DNA molecules of two
individuals we can tell approximately how far time ago
they shared a common ancestor. For example, you and one
of your first cousins will be found to have a very small
number of differing points in your DNA due to mutations,
because you have a very recent common ancestor (any of
your two common grandparents). But an Australian
aboriginal and a “white” American will be found to
have a larger number of differences in their DNA’s,
because they share a more distant ancestor (on average).

Now, the scientific methods of dating
materials have been vehemently attacked by some religious
fundamentalists and “creationists” (people who deny
that the theory of biological evolution is correct),
because the scientific findings do not agree with the
wisdom of their holy books. Once, I had a
series of weekly meetings (which lasted for several
months) with a such a believer, a minister of the Jehovah’s
Witnesses sect — call him Joe — who was also a
creationist. Joe believed that the age of the Earth is as
estimated by scientists, i.e., around 4.5 billion years.
He had no trouble with that.(*) But he denied that the age of our species is
roughly 150,000 years, believing it instead to be close
to 10,000. The reason is that there is a genealogy of men
in the Jewish Bible, a chain of X begat Y, which starts
with Adam and ends with Jesus, i.e., two millennia ago,
and since the life span of the longest-lived individual,
Methuselah, is given explicitly (969 years), it is
impossible to reach a number anywhere near 150,000 even
if most people in the chain lived almost as long as
Methuselah. (For many of the initial members in the
chain, their life span is given explicitly.) Joe’s
organization had compiled a text in which some scientist’s
words were taken out of context, making it appear as if
the scientist was saying that the scientific dating
methods for human fossils are all wrong. When I went to
the local library, found the original sources, and read
them in the proper context, I realized that the scientist
was reporting what a creationist had said about
dating methods, actually arguing against the creationist.
By the time I had collected all the evidence for this
shameless slandering done by the Jehovah’s Witnesses
sect, and just when I was ready to present it to Joe, he
decided he didn’t want to continue our meetings
anymore. (Saved by the bell... I still have the evidence,
though.)

This selective rejection
or acceptance of scientific methods, according to
whatever suits one’s religious doctrines and agenda, is
characteristic of the irrational thinking of
religious fundamentalists. Hypocritically, they accept
the science that turns on their TV sets, causes their
computers to function and their cellular phones to
communicate (to mention just a few examples), but reject
the science that measures the dates of fossils. When it
suits us, it is good science; when not, it’s bad
science. The irrationality of the religious mind is a
very interesting phenomenon, and is examined later (in this section).

Turning now to where
our earliest ancestors appeared, the scientific evidence has
again converged to a single answer. Christians and Jews believe
that the place was the garden of Eden, somewhere in Mesopotamia
(today’s Iraq), and that our first ancestors were two
individuals, Adam and Eve. Some Muslims believe Adam was sent
somewhere in India after his creation (e.g., see here). No religion has guessed correctly the true location
of our origin,(*) except possibly
some tribes in Eastern Africa, between Ethiopia and Kenya
(assuming they have creation myths), because that is
where we originated from.

The region marked with
green on the map of Africa on the left encloses
approximately the area where the most ancient fossils of
our own kind have been unearthed. There is also
independent evidence from DNA analysis that confirms the
African origin hypothesis, except that in this case the
conclusion is not so specific as to say “East Africa”,
but simply “Africa”. Sources that
present and analyze in detail the scientific evidence
include Roger Lewin’s Human Evolution,[7] Richard Leakey’s The Origin of Humankind,[8] Steve Olson’s Mapping Human History,[9] and Richard Cowen’s History of Life.[10] The same sources discuss the evidence for the
age of our species. Lewin’s book (in unit 7) and Cowen’s
book (in chapter 2) also discuss the details of
scientific dating methods for finding the age of rocks
and fossils. (Those two books have also been used as
textbooks in many universities of the U.S.A.)

Isn’t this modern conclusion wonderful? Well,
to some people at least (like me) it is, while to others
it’s not exactly music to their ears. Groups of people that
would feel disturbed by this conclusion, besides religious
fundamentalists who insist to take the word of their holy book
literally, include all racists, and others who insist on
the purity of their origins; because, besides everything else,
this conclusion implies that our earliest ancestors were all
“black”. We are all “blacks”! All people on Earth:
“white” Americans, Australians, and Europeans (including
Adolph Hitler, let us not forget), Jews, Arabs, Indians, East
Asians, American Indians, Australian aboriginals, Eskimos, and of
course people of African descent anywhere on the planet, we all
have only “black” ancestors, if we move sufficiently
far back in our genealogy. The fictional characters Adam and Eve,
if they existed they would have to have chocolate-colored skin,
too. Nobody’s roots are “purely white”.

What about the size of the population of our first ancestors?
Steve Olson[9] estimates it to be anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000
(p. 28). This estimate comes from DNA analysis, working backwards
from the present population, and taking into account the “molecular
clock” which is inferred by the mutations of the DNA structure
(discussed earlier).

At this point some readers might experience a
conceptual difficulty in accepting the above estimate. If our
ancestors started at any number as large as the above,
how could they be the first ones? How did they arrive to the
world, didn’t they have parents? If not, then who created them?
If yes, then wouldn’t their parents (and grandparents, and
grand-grand...) also be our ancestors?

The long answer is already given on this
page of mine, so I will not
attempt to repeat it here. The short answer is that we are not
talking about some specific instant in time, some
beautiful day on which we take a snapshot of the human
population, count heads, find them to be 15,824 (say), and decide
that these and none else count as our “original ancestors”.
Of course it doesn’t work like that. We are talking about a
period of time that lasted for thousands of years, maybe even
tens of thousands of years, during which our ancestors were
changing from what we now call Homo erectus to Homo
sapiens. During this period of thousands of years, people
were at a transitional stage between the two species, and they
wouldn’t be placed squarely into one kind or the other. All of
those were our ancestors: the Homo erectus individuals
before the transition, the transitional ones, and the Homo
sapiens individuals after the transition was complete. Note
that this is a general process that applies to all living kinds
that evolve and change from some ancestor species to some
descendant one; it’s not particular to our kind. And, please,
before considering writing to me, complaining that what I
describe is logically impossible, make sure you have read and
understood my long answer (see the page referenced above).

But how could a mere 10,000 to 20,000
individuals be spread out in a vast region like the one depicted
on the map, above? The answer is that the region on the map shows
the approximate area where our ancestors could have been
roaming for thousands of years; it’s not an area that was
populated by some specific 10,000–20,000 people at some
particular instant in time.

When did our ancestors start spreading out of their original
location, populating the rest of Africa, the Middle East, the
rest of Asia, Europe, and even Australia, and (much later) the
Americas? The chronology of events, as is known today from both
archaeological findings and DNA analysis, is as follows:

For several tens of thousands of years, perhaps
until around 100,000 years ago, our ancestors remained in the
region of Africa shown earlier. Throughout this time, the only
tools they were making were simple stones, chopped on one end to
make them pointy (by hitting them with other stones), by which
they would kill game, carve flesh out of bones, and occasionally
crush the head of a member of a rival tribe. (There is no
evidence for this latter idea, but I doubt anyone would seriously
contest it.) Their mode of subsistence must have been the “hunter–gatherer”
one, by which is meant that men “hunt” (which, more often
than not, includes collecting nuts, roots, fruits, etc., rather
than killing game, as Jared Diamond[11] points out) and women collect the food at home base,
store it, prepare it for consumption, and distribute it. Many
tribes of Africans and American Indians continue to operate in
this mode of living today, and that’s where our knowledge comes
from: direct observation. (It is assumed that the mode of living
of contemporary indigenous tribes has not changed in some
essential way until our times.)

During a period between 100,000 and 60,000
years ago, a great shift in intelligence appeared among our
ancestors, a shift that has been termed “the Great Leap Forward”[11] by paleoanthropologists. The old clumsy stone-made
tools were replaced by other, more delicate ones, made mostly of
bone. Interestingly, forms of art (making beads and other
ornaments, painting) appeared at the “same time” (bear in
mind that the time referred to here spans thousands of years).
Anthropologists and cognitive scientists suspect that the
improvement of competence in language made possible this “sudden”
burst in creative activity. This does not mean that brains grew
larger. Our present brain size had already been reached by our
earliest ancestors, around 200,000 to 150,000 years ago. Greater
intelligence might be the result of qualitative (better organized
neuronal connections) rather than quantitative change. Whatever
the causes, the Great Leap Forward coincided with a physical “leap
forward”, by which our ancestors left their original location
of Eastern Africa and spread, gradually, to the rest of the
world.

The above map, adapted from Lewin[7] and Olson,[9] shows the general routes our ancestors took while
moving out of their original region in Eastern Africa. Note that
one route involves the crossing of the Strait of Bab el Mandeb,
the narrowest point where the southwestern tip of the Arabian
peninsula nearly touches Africa, sometime between 80,000 and
70,000 years ago. (The K stands for 1000 years on the map.) Although the Strait is
so narrow that can hardly be seen on the map (see also the
previous enlarged view of Africa), its 27 kilometers (17 miles)
presented a formidable task of navigation to earlier species of
humans.(*) Perhaps by this time our ancestors possessed enough
curiosity to attempt a risky trip over the sea, enough general
intelligence to conceive of something like a raft, and enough
complexity in verbal communication to coordinate the building of
a raft by several peers. Whatever the cognitive skills involved,
we know that H. sapiens arrived in Australia around
65,000 years ago. However, this should not be imagined as a
single brave expedition that was accomplished during a single
lifetime. Instead, it involved the gradual spreading of tribes
along encampments that remained at a reasonable distance from the
seashore, over thousands of years. The spreading happens
because people are pressured by crowded conditions to explore new
and untapped resources. Soon after the time people reached
Australia, some of Australia’s large marsupial mammals were
driven to extinction. This, besides human bones, is an additional
indicator of the time around which people reached Australia.

Another route involves moving northbound on
land, passing over today’s Egyptian peninsula of Sinai, and
from there to regions of Asia and Europe. However, their
spreading should have been far from effortless and unhindered,
because somewhere in today’s Israel, and then further in Turkey
and southeastern Europe, they must have met with the previous
inhabitants of those regions, the Neanderthals. The latter must
have been an offshoot of our ancestor species, Homo erectus,
which had already inhabited the Old World (Africa, Asia, and
Europe) since around 1.5 million years ago, starting once again
from Africa. Thus, there have been at least two
out-of-Africa events: an earlier one, of our ancestor species H.
erectus, and a more recent one, of our own H. sapiens
(the event described here; note that
Alan Templeton describes a third such event, between the two
mentioned above, plus a more recent event of moving from Asia
back to Africa — see Dawkins,[30] pp. 57–60). The Neanderthals appeared as early as
500,000 years ago, and were completely extinct as late as 24,000
years ago. Molecular evidence tentatively suggests that our
ancestors did not mix with the Neanderthals,[9] because no parts of our DNA have been found yet that do
not seem to converge to a more distant past than around 150,000
to 200,000 years ago. (If we had mixed genetically with the
Neanderthals we should have some DNA parts common with them that
converge to ancestors older than at least 500,000 years.)
However, this conclusion is still debated.

Note that the arrows on the map, above, do not
mean to depict specific routes taken, but rather indicate the
general direction of spreading of our species. The Americas must
have been inhabited no earlier than 13,000 years ago, by people
who crossed the Bering Strait (the 92 km or 58 miles of sea that
separates Siberia from Alaska), at a time when the sea level had
dropped due to glaciation, exposing the land where the water is
shallow and turning the Bering Strait into a land bridge. The first native Americans were blocked by glaciers
and stayed in Alaska for some time (a few generations), but
eventually the glaciers receded and people managed to migrate
southwards into today’s Canada and the U.S.A. From there on, it
took them only 1000 years to reach Patagonia, at the southern tip
of South America.[7]

It was mentioned above that the initial size of our first
ancestors’ population is estimated to have been between 10,000
and 20,000. By the year 2000 it reached approximately
6,000,000,000 (six billion). How did our size change over time,
and why did we become so many? It is extremely important to
understand this if we want a proper understanding of how religion
evolved, for the following reason: for most of the time, i.e.,
for around 150,000 years, our existence was characterized by the
following attributes:

hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence,

small global population size (from a few
thousand to at most a few million), and

primarily ancestor-worship, or what I
would call “small-scale, ‘amateuristic’ (pagan)
religion”.

But for around the last 10,000 years (only),
our mode of existence changed drastically. Specifically, it
acquired the following attributes:

farmer mode of subsistence,

very large global population size (of the
order of several billion), and

predominantly God-worship (with capital
G), or what I would call “large-scale,
institutionalized religion”.

These attributes were not independent of each
other. It is because of the farmer mode of subsistence that large
populations — much larger than before — could be fed
and maintained. Also, large populations brought about the
emergence of classes among people (merchants, soldiers,
slaves, scribes, aristocrats, and, last but not least, priests). It was because of farming
and agriculture(*) that human populations could now afford to feed classes
of people who did not work in order to earn their living (e.g.,
soldiers, priests, aristocrats), something that was unthinkable
in the previous, hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. One of the
consequences of the division of human populations into classes
was the structural “complexification” of religion: instead of
a single shaman-king of the tribe, there was now an entire class
of people, the priesthood, hierarchically organized with a
supreme leader (e.g., a Pope, an Ecumenical Patriarch, a Grand
Ayatollah, etc.), a few individuals close to the supreme leader
(archbishops, ayatollahs), and more individuals farther from the
leader, and closer to the base of the pyramid (bishops, priests,
muftis, imams, etc.). An
excellent source that explains not only the above, but also why
agriculture arose in particular places in the world and not
in others (resulting in the perceived “supremacy” of the “white”
people, when in fact any technological advancements by “whites”
were granted to them by mere strokes of geographical, botanical,
and zoological luck), is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and
Steel,[12] a Pulitzer
Prize winner, and a must-read for anyone who wonders why some “races”
appear more capable, and hence dominant, than others.

It should be noted that in very recent
times — perhaps for the last 300–400 years, after the
Renaissance — a considerable part of humanity has switched to a
third mode of subsistence: the mode of services, in
which the product of one’s work is not something edible, or
even tangible, but it can still be of value to other people. For
instance, it can be insurance, a movie, a novel, a piece of
software, a lottery, a piece of legal advice, a deal, or simply a
re-selling of somebody else’s work. Because many of us earn a
living in this mode of subsistence, it is easy to overlook the
vast effect that the farmer mode have had on human society. Yet,
just as the services mode is very short compared to the farmer
mode, so the farmer mode is very short compared to the
hunter-gatherer mode. Another observation is that the emergence
of each mode does not imply the elimination of the previous ones:
there are still hunter-gatherers in many places of the world, but
they tend to play a peripheral role in global world affairs.

With the above in mind, let’s examine a graph
that depicts the growth of human population over time.

The population is shown on the vertical axis,
whereas time is on the horizontal axis, and it corresponds almost
exactly with the Western notion of “year”; that is, time zero
corresponds to 1 AD
(or 1 CE), or to 1 BC (or BCE), whichever you prefer; time -2,000 corresponds to the
year 2000 BC (or BCE), give or take one year, an
adjustment that has no significance at all for the purposes of
the above graph. The blue region on the bottom-right shows
approximately how the human population changed over time. The
data to construct this graph were taken from this page, and this one. A version of this graph can be found here.

We see that the the growth of the curve on the
above graph is such that the population remains nearly invisible
for more than half of the time depicted, until it becomes visible
and starts rising in historical times, shooting sharply upwards
in recent times. But the most interesting part for our purposes
is not the visible, but the invisible part of the curve;
specifically, the length of the invisible part. Notice that the
graph stops on the left at -10,000 (at which time the data
suggest a population of 4 to 5 million). That’s not the
beginning of our species, though; it is an arbitrary time,
shortly before the emergence of agriculture. If we were to
include the whole duration of existence of our species, with the
conventional time -150,000 on the left (where I estimated earlier
the size of our population to be around 10,000 – 20,000
individuals), we would need to extend the graph 15 times to the
left, with the population curve coinciding exactly with the
horizontal axis throughout this leftward extension. If you have a
hard time imagining this, then picture it on the next figure:

The above figure by itself tells us nothing
more interesting than that our population curve took a sharp
increase shortly after the emergence of agriculture. What’s
more interesting is that throughout the hunter-gatherer mode of
subsistence, and even later until well into the historical times
(i.e., for the entire part where the height of the curve is
practically zero), the religious beliefs of people had
nothing to do with God; they were beliefs based on ancestor
souls, ghosts, good and bad spirits that inhabit the woods, the
lake, the sea, or other unknown, dangerous, and scary places, and
so on — just the sort of beliefs that the few remaining
hunter-gatherers hold today (they will be discussed a bit more,
soon). If we want to plot the rise of the monotheistic religions
that sprang from Judaism in the above graph (i.e., Christianity
and Islam), then we get the following:

Monotheistic religions in which the notion “God”
is dominant are marked in red, above. The appearance of Judaism
is marked as starting shortly before time zero, keeping the curve
practically at zero for a while due to the insignificant number
of Jews compared to the world population, and from time zero and
beyond it is largely due to Christianity, and then in addition to
Islam, that the red portion of the graph shoots upwards. Before
rushing to accuse me of “painting God into a corner” (rather
literally), consider that the above graphs were constructed out
of hard facts; they hopefully give us a clearer perspective of
the magnitude and duration of the idea “God” (the God meme)
in humanity than we tend to attribute to it today — at least
for those of us who live in cultures imbued with the notion of
“God”.

Now, having a rough idea of the timeline of the spreading of our
ancestors throughout the world, let’s focus on their religious
concepts and customs: approximately when did they originate, what
form did they have when they began, and how did they evolve over
time?

It is hard to answer the first question with
any degree of certainty, but there are indications that beliefs
that today we would categorize as “concerning the supernatural”
emerged around 100,000 to 90,000 years ago. How do we infer this?
Because that’s the approximate time that we encounter the most
ancient graves with anything like objects that accompany the
deceased person (e.g., source).
Burials might have happened even earlier (though not much
earlier), but a plain burial is not evidence for belief in an
afterlife. For
example, the relatives of the deceased person might loathe to see
their previously living relative being consumed by scavengers.(*) But if there are objects in the grave, together with
the dead body, what purpose could these objects serve other than
to accompany the person in his or her afterlife? Of course, it is
always possible to object to this idea, countering that the
living relatives might not want to be seeing the deceased person’s
belongings anymore, because such objects would cause them
psychological pain. It is always possible to speculate with
counter-arguments against something that is a mere interpretation
of a fact (the fact is that objects were found in graves), but
one should keep the various interpretations under a rational
perspective. For instance, if you want to get rid of objects, you
can dump them somewhere else, not necessarily in the grave (as if
the latter is a trash bin). Αlso, we don’t find just any
random collection of belongings, but ones of particular types, of
rather symbolic value. The fact that we can’t find this
practice before 100,000 years ago, means that most probably it
is because people did not have the cognitive capacity to
entertain the idea of afterlife prior to that time.

But the precise time at which belief in the
afterlife emerged is not very important. What is more important
is to understand what kinds of religious beliefs our ancestors
used to have during most of our existence as a species. Given
that their mode of subsistence was that of the hunter-gatherer
until fairly recently (i.e., until around 10,000 years ago), we
can draw conclusions about their religious beliefs by observing
the few remaining modern hunter-gatherers. Anthropologists have
been doing precisely that for a long time, and a lot of data has
been accumulated. The overall picture that emerges is that
hunter-gatherer religious (or better described as supernatural)
beliefs revolve around souls of deceased ancestors, witches,
fairies, other spirits, etc.. When something bad and unexpected
happens, such as the roof of a hut collapsing, the explanation
offered can be that some imaginary but well-known bad witch
caused this intentionally, to hurt some people (in Boyer[3], ch.1). The members of the tribe might gather and
discuss, trying to figure out why the witch wanted to cause harm,
and how to appease her. Bad weather might be caused by the
displeased souls of ancestors, and thunders might be their angry
voices. If one walks alone, away from the tribe, spirits good and
bad accompany this person, who is then at their mercy. This is a
mere medley of typical hunter-gatherer supernatural beliefs.
Since they do not possess any more specific beliefs about gods or
God, we might call these beliefs religious, instead of
superstitious.

However, today not only most people do not live
in a hunter-gatherer world, but also most people do not have
religious beliefs of the hunter-gatherer kind, such as those
described in the previous paragraph. Today the overwhelming
majority of people are believers of a handful of religions, the
dominant ones among which are descendants of Judaism. This change
in “style” of religious beliefs is not a coincidence. The
hunter-gatherer “style” of beliefs was unsuitable for the
later, agricultural world, who developed beliefs in specific
gods, who were often also creators of the world, or of parts of
the world. Let’s see briefly some of those more recent
religious beliefs, as they were shaped by the time of the
farmers:

The Egyptians believed in Amun (or Ammon,
the creator), Ra (sun-god), Osiris (god of the dead),
Isis (goddess of magic, wife of Osiris), Nut
(sky-goddess, wife of Ra), Geb (earth-god, lover of Nut),
Thoth (god of wisdom), Seth (desert-god), Horus (son of
Isis and Osiris), etc. There were quarrels among gods
(Seth killed his brother Osiris, who thus became king of
the dead), illicit love affairs (Nut flirting with Geb),
wars (Horus against Seth), as well as stories about how
and why the Nile floods and fertilizes the land once a
year, how the sun cruises the sky and shines on the earth
once every day, and so on. Such stories and characters
constituted the Egyptian mythology.

The Greeks believed in Zeus (king of the
Olympian gods), Poseidon (sea-god), Hera (wife of Zeus),
Athena (goddess of wisdom), Apollon (god of music), Ares
(war-god), Artemis (goddess of hunting), Demeter (goddess
of crops), Aphrodite (goddess of love), Hades (god of the
dead), and more. There were again quarrels and wars among
gods (Zeus became king by overthrowing his father Cronos,
together with the rest of the Titans, after a fierce
battle), illicit love affairs (Zeus must be the record
holder, hiding his love affairs with mortal women from
his wife Hera, usually transforming them into some
animal). Again, there were numerous stories constituting
the Greek mythology; stories about how the world
came to be, how people learned to use fire (the good
Titan Prometheus gave it to people after stealing it from
Zeus, who then gave him a harsh punishment), how Zeus decided
to purge the world and all people in a Great Deluge, save
for a single couple (Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha), who
built an ark, and after nine days of floating on water,
their ark touched ground on the peak of mount Parnassos.(*) Greek mythology is known to us in great detail,
largely due to the focus of the Western world on its
ancient Greek heritage.

The Romans later inherited the Greek gods
and their stories wholesale, in the grandest act of
plagiarism the world has ever known. They only
romanized the names of the gods: Zeus became Jupiter,
Poseidon – Neptune, Hera – Juno, Athena – Minerva,
Apollon – Apollo, Ares – Mars, Artemis – Diana,
Demeter – Ceres, Aphrodite – Venus, Hades – Pluto,
Cronos – Saturn, and so on. Romans added some stories
of their own, and the totality of the greco-roman stories
formed the Roman mythology.

The Jews believed in a single god, Yahweh,
who was later adopted by Christianity (as God) and Islam
(as Allah). The Jewish mythology included its
own versions of creation, Great Flood, and wars. Except
that, since there were no other gods for Yahweh to fight
with, in this case it was the wars of the “Lord’s
chosen people”, the Jews, waged against neighboring
tribes, which were recorded in their mythology, based
sometimes on real events, other times on legend. But
there are great differences among the Jewish beliefs and
those of all others. Specifically, whereas most other
peoples (or at least the educated individuals among them)
were more-or-less aware of the myth-o-logical
(i.e., story-telling) nature of their beliefs, the Jews
took their stories seriously. Whereas among their
contemporary cultures (e.g., Greeks, Romans) there were
thinkers who believed that mythology was a bunch of fairy
tales for the masses, and openly expressed this view in
their writings, among the Jews there is not a single
person known to have expressed this opinion, opposing the
official dogma; and this is not a great mystery, because
opposing Jewish religion was punishable by death. Not
only did the Jews believe in the literal truth of their
mythology, but this attitude was inherited by their
descendant religions: even today, there are plenty of
Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Jewish
Bible (the Old Testament, in Christian terms), although a
rather larger number of Christians believe that the Old
Testament account is figurative (an “allegory”); in the Muslim
world, the situation is not very different from the
ancient Jewish one: the Koran is believed to be the word
of Allah, and in most Muslim nations(*) disbelief in the literal truth of the Koran is
punishable by death.

The Jewish beliefs are the progenitors of religious memes that
later spread like wildfire in the world, so the Jewish religion
is a special one in the context of the evolution of religion. It
reveals how religious concepts changed. As a case in point, the
God of the Old Testament (O.T., or Jewish Bible) is theoretically
the same God as the one of contemporary Christianity; but in
practice, the O.T. God was very different. He had very different
attributes from the Christian God. The latter is a more “evolved”
version of the former. For one thing, the O.T. God was a physical
entity. He had a voice, and legs to walk with. According to Gen
3:8, Adam and Eve heard God’s voice who was walking on
the garden of Eden, and they scurried somewhere to hide
themselves, feeling guilty because they had just eaten from the
forbidden fruit. Then God has a dialogue with Adam and Eve (“Where
art thou?”, etc.). We should note that the story is not meant
to be read as a mere metaphor, because the garden of Eden (into
which God was doing his walking) was a very real, physical garden
on Earth, situated among four rivers known to the ancient
Hebrews, one of which was the well-known river Euphrates (Gen
2:10-14), so Eden was some place here on Earth, somewhere in
Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), where Euphrates flows. The idea
that the story of Adam and Eve should be read as an allegory
dawned only later to some people who saw the absurdity of
believing it literally (although not all other believers perceive
it as absurd).

Now, if God had physical legs to walk with on a
physical garden, and presumably a mouth as well, one wonders,
what other organs did that God have? He couldn’t be an assembly
of just two legs and a mouth, could he? There should be a head
with a brain (that did the thinking before the talking), a body
to hold the head and legs together, and who knows what else. But
this is not the only narrative in the O.T. that describes an
anthropomorphic God. In Exd 33:9-23, for example, God talks to
Moses “face to face” (Exd 33:11) shortly before giving him
the ten commandments. Moses pleads to God to allow him to see his
face, God refuses (because anyone who sees his face must die, Exd
33:20), but allows Moses to see his back parts (Exd 33:23). Well,
if the Jewish God had a head and legs to walk with, it is little
wonder that he also possessed a back side (along with its
appurtenances, presumably), but what is important is that the
excerpts from Exodus show a consistent view of God in the O.T.
This anthropomorphic view, which is in full agreement with the
anthropomorphism of gods of other civilizations, contemporary
with the Jews, contrasts sharply with the Christian God of later
times, who is supposed to be a pure spirit, devoid of human-like
features such as legs, mouth, head, sex, etc. (though not of
thought — read this page of mine to
see the problems that arise with a God who thinks). By the time
Islam was established, the Christian God had already acquired his
present-day abstract attributes, so Islam inherited the idea of
an abstract God — a “pure spirit”.

The O.T. God’s physicality and human-like
figure, as opposed to the later Christian/Islamic spiritual God,
is only one indicator of the evolution that religion went
through. Another indicator is the evolution of God’s morality.
This is the subject of the following section.

2.1 Biological Foundations of Morality and its Evolution

The O.T. God is
a God whose acts would be objectively judged as morally
despicable by any person of today who is not blinded by the viral
memes of Judaism and Christianity. To corroborate the
previous statement with some evidence, recall that God
obliterates two cities by burning all their inhabitants —
apparently including the babies — because they were immoral,(*) but saving one couple: Lot and his wife, who however
made the error to turn and look back over her shoulder, and God
instantly turned her into a pillar of salt (Gen 19:24-25).
Earlier, the same man, Lot, had proposed to some thugs who were
pestering him (trying to break the door of his house), to give
them his two virgin daughters, to do as they pleased with them
(Gen 19:8), provided the thugs would leave Lot and his male guests
in peace! In an earlier episode, God exterminates the entire
population of Earth in a Great Flood (except Noah and his family;
again, favoritism does not seem to be an accusation that would
make God — or rather, the authors of the Bible — blush). Even earlier, God
asks an old man, Abraham, to sacrifice his only son, and the
moment Abraham is ready to deliver the deadly blow with a knife
to the child on the altar, God replaces the child with a ram.(*) But at a later instance, a virgin girl is roasted on
the altar by her father, Jephthah, a general of the Jews, who
vowed to God that he would sacrifice anything/anyone who would
come out of his door first and come to greet him upon returning
home, should God help him achieve a great military victory (Jdg
11:30-40); this time God did not deem it necessary to replace the
poor victim with some ovine, so the girl was turned to the first
documented human barbeque. This is only a brief anthology of the
gory violence and — by today’s standards — moral corruption
that is presented as virtuous and commendable (or merely
worth-mentioning) throughout the Old Testament. A much more
complete one can be found in Dawkins’s The God Delusion,[13]pp. 237-250.

What happened to God
later? Why did God change so drastically, and from a genocidal,
misogynist, diabolically jealous bigot(*) — in
comparison to whom, Satan appears like a true angel — turned
into the fatherly benign spirit of the A.D. times? We must
believe either the incredible, namely, that God himself improved,
or a much more economical explanation: that people’s ideas
about their own selves (how they should behave toward
others, etc.), improved, and this improvement was reflected in
how people imagined their God. We have a different
set of moral principles now, according to which it is immoral for
a higher authority to inflict damage on the weak and helpless.(*) This was not so only a few decades ago, and the
situation appears worse and worse as we move back in time ([13], pp. 262-272). How did we acquire our modern concepts
about morality? Where did our morality come from? Is it
heaven-sent? Could it ever have come from religions that brandish
holy books which extol the making of shish kebab out of the flesh
of virgin girls? Highly unlikely. Could there be a more natural
origin of our morality? This is examined in what follows.

Once, a few years ago, I received an email
message from a psychologist writing from Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
She had just read an earlier version of this page of mine, where I discuss what I consider to be the two
main contradictions in religious ideas about God, and wanted to
give me a lesson in matters of faith, belief, the universe, where
we come from, how I “do not understand God’s attributes as
revealed by scripture”, and so on. The next day I received a
message from her husband, “a physicist for 23 years and now a
seminarian”, who, after presenting his religious point of view,
cautioned me about his wife. He said, “I will argue for [God’s
existence], she will attempt to prove.” Indeed, the next day his
wife, filled to the brim with religious certitude and her culture’s
arrogance,(*) set out to prove to me that God exists, by drawing what
she thought was an ace from her sleeve; specifically, posing what
she thought is a real conundrum for any atheist: where did
our morality come from?

After exchanging a few more messages, I soon
realized there was exactly zero possibility to establish any line
of communication with that person. She seemed to me as mind-deaf
as a rock (a rock of faith, perhaps?), and after a few days I
dropped out of the discussion, figuring that if we continued, we
would be talking like signal-exchanging ships cruising along
opposite directions at night. What remained in my mind as an
interesting idea after this exchange was the psychologist’s
conviction that the question “Where did our morality come from?”
is answered like this: “It came from God! We are moral because
God is moral, and He wants us to be moral, too!”

Amazing. Why would people who are expected to be rational
thinkers, like the psychologist and her ex-physicist husband,
consider this circular reasoning(*) to be an answer at all? How can rational people fail
to see the sorely missing explanation in this “explanation”
of human morality when they attribute it to the morality of a
higher being? Why don’t they ask themselves, why is that
morality the way it is and not otherwise? Conceivably, we could
be living in an evil God’s universe, couldn’t we? It could be
a malicious God who has an army of scourge-inflicting angels to
serve him, and who has banished the only benevolent angel, the
Satan, to hell: the only place where good things happen 24/7. That
God would want us to be bad like him, and so, crime would be
rampant in our world, and the few good-doers would be
incarcerated, serving long sentences in jail. Well? Why is reality
not
like that?

Religious people usually balk at the idea of
questioning the origin of their God’s attributes. Typically,
their answer is “God’s ways are mysterious”, not realizing
that this is another way of saying “I don’t know, but I don’t
want to admit that I don’t know.” The issue of the shutting
down of the faculty of logic by religion will be examined later on, but now we can try to answer this question: Would it
ever be possible for us to live in a malicious God’s world, as
described above?

Anyone who believes that the origin of our
morality is God and can think rationally would have to admit that
the fact that “good” is laudable and “evil” is punishable
in our world is a matter of mere chance. There is a 50% chance that
our God could be evil,(*) and wanted us
to be evil, too. It so happened that our God is good —
that’s what the believer must believe.

But my view is different. No, our world could
not be one in which evil prevails and good is the exception. It
is not a coincidence at all that we live in a world in which
teachers and spiritual leaders urge us to be good, and in which
the minority of people who commit crimes are isolated from the
majority. Our morality is explicable by recourse to biological
principles, according to which there is no 50-50% chance to be
moral or immoral; our world could not be different from the way
it is. This is what is shown immediately below.

Let’s start with a thought experiment, which
I will then implement as a program and turn into an actual
experiment, so we’ll verify that the thought experiment really
works that way.

Suppose there are two kinds of animals in
an environment that includes a limited amount of food for
those animals: some plants, for instance, which the animals
eat. Call the two kinds of animals the W’s and the T’s
— my choice of letters will become evident in a minute. So,
say we start with several individuals of kind W, and an equal
number of kind T animals. Both kinds of animals have the
custom to take food and cache it for later consumption. But
— and here is the difference between the two kinds — the
W-animals are all “workers”, which means they simply pick
up food when they find it in their vicinity; whereas the
T-animals are occasionally “thieves”, which means the
following: sometimes they pick up food when they find it on
their way, but some other times they steal food from their
conspecifics. How much they manage to steal is a parameter of
the experiment. Also, what percent of the T-animals comprises
thieves, and how often such an individual will actually
commit a theft (when meeting a conspecific) are different
parameters of this imagined world. The T-animals never attack
the W-animals, nor vice-versa. (Why? Because that would
destroy their characterization as “thieves”. See the readers’
reactions, below, for the full
explanation.)

Otherwise, each animal lives approximately
for at most a given time, and when it dies, it is “returned
to the environment”, i.e., there is a chance that a plant
might grow somewhere after the death of the animal. While
living, once the animal possesses enough “energy” (which
means, once its cache of stored food items exceeds a
threshold), it can give birth to another animal of the same
kind, which starts roaming in the environment, looking for
food, and so on. Suppose all animals of each kind are
identical in their structure, i.e., there are no mutations,
hence no biological evolution within the time-frame that our
experiment lasts.

In short, what is going on is an
abstraction of what one would expect in an environment where
two species compete for the same resources, within a time
short enough to regard biological evolution as negligible.
However, one species comprises honest workers who never steal
from each other, whereas the other species includes thieves
who sometimes steal from each other. What would happen to
these two species as time goes by? Would they continue to
exist forever, competing for resources? Would the thieves
disappear over time, or would they thrive at the expense of
the honest workers?

My guess, when I thought of this situation, was
that the T-animals would gradually disappear. How slowly, or how
fast? Depends on how many of them practice theft, and how
effective the thieves are at stealing: the more stealing that
occurs, the faster the T-species should disappear. The thieves
themselves, individually, might thrive and spawn more
descendants than those who do not steal. (Recall that since these
are animals, there are no prisons to incarcerate or punish in
other ways the thieves; so there is no reason why the thieves
should not thrive.) But the species of T-animals as a whole would
disappear as time goes by.

Why? Because, regardless of the habits and
fates of individuals, if we take a bird’s-eye view and look at
the two species as two wholes, we’ll see that the W-species is
a more efficient consumer of food, i.e., a more efficient
transducer of food into energy (motion), than the T-species. The
former converts all the food it encounters into energy and
descendants, whereas the latter occasionally “eats its own
flesh”: that’s what an act of stealing is. If food items are
found both in the environment and in the possession of T-animals,
then each time a T-animal steals food items from others, no food
accrues to the T-species as a whole; instead, some food items are
exchanged among its members. This might benefit some members, but
it would be detrimental for the species as a whole. As an
analogy, suppose your body corresponds to the T-species, and the
cells of your body are the individual T-animals. Some of your
lung cells are responsible for taking oxygen from the air and
direct it into your bloodstream. If all cells do this job as
expected, fine. But if some of them, instead of taking oxygen
from the outside, attack neighboring cells and strip them of
their oxygen molecules, your respiration will suffer. If all
of your lung cells are into this stealing business, you’ll soon
die of asphyxiation.

Is this thought correct? Theory and thought
experiments like the above are the province of philosophers. I am
not a philosopher, I like to build systems, usually by
programming them. When I have a question and a theory such as the
above, I immediately think of writing a computer application that
simulates the system exactly as I imagined it, so that I let the
program run and see what happens. If I were a mathematician, I
would like to put down the “axioms” of my system (“there
are two kinds of animals”, “each animal lives for time x”,
and so on), and then try to prove that either the proposition “species
T as a whole disappears”, or the proposition “species T
thrives indefinitely”, follows as a theorem. But, not only am I
not a mathematician, but I suspect that real mathematicians would
have trouble proving such propositions. What I described
above is called a “chaotic system” in computational theory,
and often the only way to deal with such systems is to let them
run and observe what happens.(*) So, let’s do
it: let’s build such a system and see what the outcome is. Here
is the program:

Please make sure you have the browser with
which you view this page in normal mode, not in zoom-in mode. (E.g., Internet
Explorer enters zoom-in mode with ctrl +, and zoom-out with ctrl –.) I was
notified by a reader that the following program does not run properly with the
page in zoomed mode.

What you see above is the space (black
rectangle) where our animals live their lives. The space is
littered with food items (“plants”, green circles). It
contains also some W-animals (yellow), and an equal number of
T-animals (red). As it stands initially, the space has 1500 food
items, 50 W’s, and 50 T’s, but these numbers are parameters
that you can change (by clicking on the settings button , see below).

Now click on the button that shows a running
figure . You’ll
see that the yellow and red (W and T) animals are set in motion.
While they move randomly, they encounter food items, grab them,
and grow fatter. After collecting enough food (if they do), they
might spawn more of their kind (one child per birth event). After
some time, they die. A “time unit” is called an “epoch”
in such simulations, and each animal makes one random step in
space per epoch. You can see the number of elapsed epochs on the
bottom-right corner, on the status bar. The same status bar shows
the numbers of W-animals (“workers”, on the left), and
T-animals (“thieves”, center). Watching how these numbers
change is the whole point of running this simulation.

There is a control for the speed of the
simulation, on the tool bar (top). After you familiarize yourself
with what is going on, increase the speed a bit, and then even
further, until what happens on the main area (the “space”) is
too fast to keep track of, so then concentrate on how the numbers
of W’s and T’s change. With the given parameters, the
T-species will vanish at any time between epochs 1000 and 8000
(these are not hard limits, but an approximate range), whereas
species W will stabilize its size somewhere around 100
individuals. No matter how many times I repeated this simulation,
I always observed the same result: species T invariably vanished.
You can repeat the simulation by pausing it first (clicking on
button ,
which is how the -button appears while the program is running), then
initializing it by clicking on the “new space” button (), and setting it
again into motion (, once more).

I would like to list now precisely the
parameters of this simulation, because they correspond to the
axioms (initial assumptions) of an axiomatic theory. The exact
values will also help the reader judge the reasonableness of the
system.

The space has a width of 100 locations,
and a height of 64 locations, or a total of 6400
locations. Every plant or animal occupies exactly one
location, and each location can hold only one plant or
animal.

There are 1500 food items (green).

Each food
item remains eternally(*) fixed on one location, until picked up by an
animal.

Animals move randomly by one location up,
down, left, right, or diagonally at every epoch.

Animals live for at least 150 epochs
(provided they find food to support themselves with
energy during this time, see below), after which they
have a probability of 0.10 to die at every subsequent
epoch. (This probability is set only to avoid the visual
effect of seeing all animals of a certain generation die
and disappear in unison; it plays no essential role,
hence it could be set to 1.)

After collecting 6 food items, an animal
can give birth to another one, identical to itself, with
a probability of 0.75. The child is placed on a random
location in space. The parent loses energy in the amount
of one food item at every birth event.

Animals can make up to 50 steps with the
energy supplied by one food item. After completing 50
steps, they have a probability of 0.95 to lose one food
item at every subsequent epoch. (This probability is set
only to avoid the visual effect of seeing food items
appearing in space in unison, since many animals could
die in unison; it plays no essential role, hence it could
be set to 1.)

Animals can die not only of old age, but
also of exhaustion: because they made at least 50 steps
and lost the last food item remaining in their
possession.

Each animal starts its life with an energy
equivalent to one food item. (Therefore, if an animal
does not find a single food item within the first 50
steps of its life, it dies of exhaustion.)

When an animal dies of exhaustion it
returns to the environment a single food item (which
appears as a plant somewhere randomly in space) with a
probability of 0.95. If it dies of old age, whatever food
items it had in its possession at the time of its death
are returned to the environment (appearing as plants,
placed randomly in space).

There are two kinds of animals: the W type
(yellow) and the T type (red). Initially there are 50 W’s
and 50 T’s.

W’s never interact with T’s, or with
each other; they only interact with food items, as
already described.

T’s have a probability of 0.10 to have
the “psychology of a thief”, as described below. This
“psychology” is given to them at birth according to
the mentioned probability, and they retain it throughout
their lives. (Thus, out of the original 50 T’s, only
around 5 will actually behave like a thief; the rest will
behave identically to the workers.)

When a T has the “psychology of a thief”,
it behaves as follows: upon encountering another T, it
has a 0.80 chance that it will steal 90% of the food
items of the other T. (Only one of the two T’s that
meet each other gets this chance, randomly.) But upon
encountering a food item, it has only 0.20 chance to pick
it up. (Thus, T’s with the psychology of a thief
usually acquire their energy by stealing, not by “working
honestly to earn their living”.)

The reader will notice that there are plenty of
parameters used in the above description (i.e., all those numbers
mentioned explicitly). Several of these parameters are essential
for the viability of the populations, and the reader can find out
what their effect is by changing them, clicking on the settings
button ().
Thus, for example, if the probability of 0.95 for an animal
(worker or thief) to turn into a food item after dying is lowered
somewhat, then there are not enough food items returned to the
environment during animal deaths, and the populations die
gradually (regardless of their type), due to starvation; whereas
if this probability is increased somewhat, then too many food
items are generated over time, and the populations of the
surviving animals increase without limit. But note that such
changes affect all animals, no matter what their type
is, so they are not important. The important observation is the
following:

As long as there are
individuals with the psychology of a thief in a species,
and assuming there is competition for resources with a
different species of non-stealing individuals, the first
species is doomed to extinction. This is true whether
there is a small or large percent of individuals with the
thief psychology, and whether the existing thieves are
efficient in stealing or not. As long as there are
thieves, their species will be driven to extinction, all
other factors being equal with the competing
species. Higher theft rate implies a shorter life span
for the species as a whole, though it also implies
prosperity for the individual thieves, as long as they
escape punishment.

Let’s take another look at the disclaimer “all
other factors being equal”. In real life, theft of various
degrees (including extreme ones, such as cannibalism) is
practiced among many animal species, including humans.
This is true because in real life not all other factors are
equal. For example, obviously, if there is no competition for
resources with another species, there is no reason why theft
should be bad for the species, provided theft is not the
only way of acquiring resources. Or, if competition
exists, but one species has an advantage over another for
completely independent reasons (e.g., it develops resistance to
heat, which the other species doesn’t), then again the
disadvantage of theft (disadvantage for the species,
that is), can be counterbalanced. For these reasons, theft, or
what we would call “crime” in general, is observed
in the biological world. But what this simulation shows is that theft,
or crime, is bad for the species as a whole, especially if
it becomes the sole means of acquiring resources. And if
something is bad for the species as a whole, then it is bad in
the long run for the individuals comprising the species, or
rather, for the descendants of those individuals (for their
genes, as we’d say in modern parlance). For, if a species goes
extinct, what difference does it make if its individuals enjoy
short-term benefits from crime? In the long run the species will
vanish, so whatever evolutionary advantages accrued to the
individuals (or to their genes), they will be thrown to the
dustbin of paleontology.

This idea, no matter how obvious or how well
supported by both evidence and proofs by simulation, is hard for
most biologists to digest. The reason is that what they see
missing is evolution. They see that certain principles
of evolution are not satisfied at the species level. In
particular, species do not normally spawn children with random
mutations, only individuals do. (If a species evolves to a
descendant species, the latter does not differ from its parent by
random mutations, but is adjusted to the new environmental
conditions.) So what happens at the level of the species is a
peculiar kind of “evolution”: it is rather “change dictated
by environmental adaptations”, not the familiar Darwinian
evolution. Some
biologists(*) (many, I suspect), might have difficulty accepting an
idea that does not follow from the most fundamental principle of
biology, i.e., Darwinian evolution, so they balk at the
suggestion that principles can exist at the level of species that
can take precedence over the evolutionary principles that work at
the lower levels of individuals and genes.

However, that a principle cannot be
conveniently put under the umbrella of another, cherished
principle, should not be a reason for rejecting it. The principle of
competition at the level of species is established both
mathematically (by simulations such as the above, because
simulations that do not depend on external input are pure formal
systems, akin to mathematical proofs), and biologically,(*) by observation of the fossil evidence.

Readers’
Reactions
Readers who read the above expressed the following
objections/questions:

1. Why don’t the T’s
steal also from the W’s?

Because then the T’s would not be thieves anymore!
Consider this example: a bear finds a beehive and takes
all the honey from it. Did the bear steal the
honey? I would be reluctant to call this an act of
stealing. Rather, I would put it under the category “food
finding”, or “doing what is necessary for survival”.
If the bear wants to survive, it better do what bears
(just like all other animals) commonly do: find food.
It is certainly not immoral to find food, is it? That’s
why we don’t call “thieves” the wolves that come
and kill a shepherd’s sheep. Or, consider a farmer who
raises chicken. Does the farmer steal the eggs
from the chicken by collecting them every morning? Is
there something immoral at that? Again, I don’t think
so. If, however, the eggs belonged to the neighbor’s
farm, and the farmer sneaked into the neighbor’s place
and snatched some eggs, that would be a theft
(from the fellow farmer’s property). Thus, I don’t
think we can attach the label “immoral” on acts that
concern the normal biological “warfare” among
different species. That’s why I didn’t want to let T’s
and W’s directly interfere with each other.

2. Why do T’s only have a
probability of 0.10 to have the psychology of a thief? I
thought you wanted to explain WHY there are just a few
that are immoral. It looks like you doomed the T’s to
extinction to get the result you wanted.

On the contrary! If I allow more T’s with the
psychology of a thief in the beginning, what happens is
that the T species disappears faster! The more T’s
there are that behave as thieves, the faster their kind
is eliminated.

But you can test this for yourself. Try clicking on the
settings button (). On the
colorful dialog that pops up, look at the bottom-most,
pink region. There is an entry there that says: Probability to be a thief:
0.1. Change this number to something larger, 0.5 for
instance, or even to 1.0 if you wish, click on OK, then
on the initialize button (),
then run (). The larger you make this
number, the fewer epochs the T species will survive. So,
I used a small number such as 0.1 as a default, above, in
a sense to protect the T’s from disappearing
too soon. As visitors and users of this program observed,
their attempts to tweak the values of parameters only
caused the poor T species to disappear faster.

Now, you might think that I still don’t explain why
there are just a few individuals that are immoral, and
that I simply set their percent at a low value to begin
with. But I do explain their small number. The
explanation is as follows: if in the real world the
situation was as pure as it appears in my simulation,
then there would be no thieves at all, because
any species that included them would soon vanish, so we’d
observe only survivor species (like the W’s) that lack
thieves. However, the real biological world is not as
pure and crystal-clear as my simulation. There might be
no competition with other species, or some stealing can
be afforded because the species enjoys some other
unrelated benefits. That’s why there can be a few
thieves in some species (including ours): because they
can be afforded by nature. If, however, stealing turns
rampant, then food-finding for the species as a whole
suffers, and the species is driven to extinction because
of its poor ability to collect resources from its
environment. That’s why we don’t observe species in
which stealing is the rule, and normal food-finding is
the exception.

3. If stealing is
beneficial for the individual thief, but has negative
effects only for the species as a whole, as you claim,
then what sense does it make to behave morally? Thinking
individualistically, I should act immorally. Why should I
care about the future of my species? Isn’t your
simulation suggesting that we should all be immoral?

Oops! You reached a completely wrong conclusion. My
simulation is about animals that do not punish crime.
Humans have jails, judges, lawyers, police, and a host of
other concepts and mechanisms, all geared toward the idea
of punishing the wrong-doers, none of which is found
among other animal species. If you think that acting
immorally will benefit you, I would suggest that you
think twice about the consequences of your actions when
(if) the law is enforced upon you. I did not include any
punishment mechanism in my simulation because it examines
the question of the foundations of morality in animal
species, all of which but one (humans) lack punishment
methods and law enforcement.

Naturally, all species except one (us) are incapable of
entertaining your thought. So, from a moral perspective,
they behave “as expected”, that is, “righteously”
on average. Humans, the only species that can entertain
your thought, punishes immorality; and this can’t be a
coincidence, because if it didn’t happen we probably
wouldn’t be around.

Of course, one might reject the idea that this
simulation shows anything significant, by appealing to the
multitude of uncontrollable factors that exist in reality, which
are ignored in the simulation. Granted, a simulation is by its
nature an idealization, so a large number of factors are ignored
(otherwise it wouldn’t be a simulation, but the real thing).
But when we want to examine a situation scientifically, the
tradition suggests using the analytic method, by which
we strip the problem of its irrelevant details, and home in on
the essential ones. For example, if we want to examine the free
fall of objects in physics, we remove noisy and irrelevant
factors such as air resistance, wind speed and direction, and
whether there might be an earthquake at the place where the
falling object lands. By eliminating all these irrelevances we
can make a simulation of free fall on our computer, and observe
the falling “object” (e.g., a dot on our screen) move down at
a constant acceleration. This is all I tried to do with the above
simulation: home in on the essentials.

I also would like to mention that it is
necessary to have two abilities to correctly assess the
importance of the above: first, to be able to isolate the
relevant from the irrelevant factors; and second, to make a cool
and rational judgment regarding one’s motivation for
posing an objection: is the motivation really the suspicion of a
flaw, or is it the subconscious urge of wanting to find
a flaw, because the correctness of the argument threatens one’s
own cherished beliefs? It is not wrong to want to find a flaw,
provided one is not blinded by such wishes and throws rationality
out the window. However, given that the reader indeed keeps the
above in mind, I would be very interested in learning about
possible flaws of the above simulation.

In summary, we
observe that stealing and associated forms of crime are
marginal activities among animals because they are
detrimental at the level of species. Thus, what we see in
our world are the only kinds of species that are viable:
the “moral” species. From the biological point of
view, we humans are nothing but another species on this
planet, so we carry all the biological baggage on our
shoulders, which includes animal morality. However, being
a cognitively complex species, we developed an intricate
system of moral principles, which includes cultural
values, priests, exorcists, the Holy Inquisition, laws,
police, prisons, judges, attorneys, lawsuits, and a host
of other concepts that are totally unprecedented in the
rest of the animal kingdom.

“But, hold on a second,” the
above-mentioned psychologist might retort. “This is precisely
the point: human morality is not just about stealing and killing.
It is so complex! Where did all this complexity come from, since
you admit it’s not present among the animals?”

My answer is that each species follows a set of
moral rules the size of which correlates with the cognitive and
social complexity of the species. For example, trees have no
cognitive abilities, hence morality is not a concept that applies
to them. Squirrels have a rudimentary cognition, and very little
social interaction among themselves, so their moral principles
are confined to the very basic core described in the above
simulation: “Don’t try to find your food solely by stealing
from thy neighbor squirrel, don’t cause harm to thy neighbor”,
and perhaps a few more that I am not aware of because I am not a
biologist studying squirrels. My “prediction” (it’s a
prediction only because I do not know) is that beavers, although
they possess a brain of approximately the same size as that of
squirrels, must be following slightly more complex moral
principles because they form large communities, so they
experience many more social interactions than squirrels. Wolves,
also with complex social life, have a larger brain and more
complex cognition than beavers, so they must be capable of
following even more moral principles. (Again, I don’t know, I
am only “predicting” out of ignorance.) Perhaps the animals
with the most complex set of moral rules aside from humans are
gorillas and chimpanzees, who have large brains and experience
intricate social lives, forming families, clans, tribes, etc. We,
humans, are simply at the top of this pyramid, having
unquestionably the most complex cognition, and being a
quintessentially social species. Just as our minds are several
orders of magnitude more complex than any other animal’s, so is
our set of moral rules. We put under our umbrella of morality issues such as
abortion, euthanasia, and — courtesy of the Catholic Church —
the use of condoms for avoiding the spread of the AIDS epidemic.(*) Of course, to have the capacity to even consider such
issues, an animal must have a mind of at least the human
complexity, and we are the only such animal currently on Earth.
To recapitulate:

We are not the only moral species, only
the one with the most complex set of moral principles,
and

The size of the set of moral principles
correlates with the cognitive capacity and social skills
of each species.

But is proposition 1 correct? Are animals
moral, even rudimentarily so? Even this has been disputed, mostly
by philosophers. It has been argued that the human nature is
really the animal nature, which is assumed to be lacking
morality, whereas what we perceive as human morality is only a
façade, the fleece of a sheep by which we have hidden the wolf
inside. Frans de Waal calls this the “veneer” theory of human
morality,[1] and provides ample evidence against it. For example:

Rats that had
learned to press a lever to obtain food would stop doing
so if their response was paired with the delivery of an
electric shock to a visible neighboring rat.[15] Even though the rats got accustomed quickly to
the idea that obtaining food shocks their neighbors,
their initial inhibition suggested an aversion to the
pain reaction of fellow rats.

Monkeys
show a stronger inhibition than rats. Rhesus monkeys
(macaques) refused to pull a chain that delivered food to
themselves if doing so shocked a companion.[16][17] One
monkey stopped pulling for five days, and another one for
12 days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion.
As de Waal observes, these monkeys were literally
starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon
another. Such sacrifice relates to the tight social
system and emotional linkage among these macaques,
supported by the finding that the inhibition to hurt
another was stronger between familiar than unfamiliar
individuals.[17]

Responses to
the distress of another seem considerably more complex in
apes than monkeys, as concluded after a content analysis
of thousands of qualitative reports.[18]

De Waal
reports several anecdotes showing beyond doubt feelings
of empathy among apes. For example, Kuni, a female bonobo
at the Twycross Zoo in England, one day captured a
starling. The keeper urged the ape to let the bird go,
out of fear that she might molest it. Kuni, after
climbing to the highest point of the highest tree,
wrapped her legs around the trunk, and, with both hands
free, unfolded the wings of the starling wide open, one
wing in each hand, and threw it as hard as she could in
the air. The stunned starling landed onto the bank of the
moat, where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a
curious juvenile.[19, p. 156]

In a recent
debate about the origins of morality, the philosopher J.
Kagan considered it obvious that a chimpanzee would never
jump into a cold lake to save another,[20] but evidence shows otherwise. Quoting J.
Goodall [21] (p.213):

“In some
zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands,
surrounded by water-filled moats. ... Chimpanzees cannot
swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they
fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have
sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from
drowning — and were sometimes successful. One adult
male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant
whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the
water.”

In short, whereas some philosophers or others
who don’t have direct experience with animals imagine that
animals are inherently immoral (mere brutes as the
literal and figurative meaning of the word suggests), scientists
who work with animals and collect evidence observe that there is
a core of animal morality, which correlates positively with the
cognitive and social complexity of the animal species.

But human morality cannot have only a
biological foundation and nothing else. There must also be a
cognitive dimension in it, because our species has not changed
substantially from a biological point of view (it has been the
same species, after all, with a given brain capacity for at least
150,000 years), whereas our morality standards keep being
enriched up to the present. As a case in point, slavery was
considered normal only a couple of centuries ago, and racist
thinking was normal even among intellectuals, less than 100 years
ago. (More on this, below.) The difference with
today is that although racism and even slavery exist, they have
been branded as scourges, and no rationally thinking intellectual
would accept them today as normal. Our moral standards keep
evolving.

2.1.1 The Bible as
Guide for Morality

Note: Some readers read what follows
in this sub-section as what it is not,
namely, as an attack on Jewish culture, and/or Jews.
Instead, this sub-section is an attack on an idea;
specifically, on the idea that our morality comes from
God, and therefore that God’s morality has been
documented in God’s book, the Bible, as many Christians
and Jews believe. That I have no enmity against Jews,
cultures, etc., is shown elsewhere
in this document
(where I express my sympathy toward the Jews
being the victims of the holocaust in WWII), but
misreadings are still possible; so please keep focused on
what this article says, and avoid reading between the
lines.

The fact that our moral standards keep evolving
should normally act as a signal to religious people that our
morality cannot be based on religion, because the holy books of
all major religions were written more than a thousand years ago.
And yet, this is apparently what religious people think.
Christians, for example — like the psychologist and her
seminarian husband — believe that their morality is caused by
God, and expounded in the Bible. It is very hard to persuade them
that they cannot be more mistaken, because they refuse to
read their Bible. They have either only a hearsay knowledge
of it, or a fragmentary knowledge which is the result of
cherry-picking: they read only what they like reading. If they
could read all of it, however, they would realize that the
so-called “good book” is one of the most horrible recipes for
moral standards, because besides their familiar “cherries” it
includes the following “onions”:

I suppose the reader already read some earlier passages describing how a little girl was roasted on the
altar by her father, so I will not repeat them here. Just
in case one thinks that’s an isolated example of
gruesome violence, consider the following:

In the book of Judges, Chapter 19, the story of a Levite
is recounted, who was on a trip from Bethlehemjudah to
his home place at the side of mount Ephraim. Together
with him he had a servant and a woman, a concubine, whose
father had given to him in Bethlehemjudah, after treating
the Levite with excellent hospitality for several days.
On their way they preferred to avoid places that were
inhabited by non-Israelites, and instead they stopped at
the town of Gibeah, which belonged to “the children of
Israel”. An old man saw the company sitting by the side
of the road, pitied them, and took them in his home to
give them shelter. While resting, dining, drinking, and
merrymaking at night in the man’s house, some men of
the city, “certain sons of Belial”, beat at the door,
and asked the old man to bring forth the man who arrived
into his house, “so that we may know him” (which is
the well-known biblical code-phrase, meaning “so that
we may sodomize him”). Then, the following is
described:

“23. And the man, the master of the house, went
out unto them, and said unto them, Nay, my brethren,
[nay], I pray you, do not [so] wickedly; seeing that this
man is come into mine house, do not this folly. 24.
Behold, [here is] my daughter a maiden, and his
concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them,
and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto
this man do not so vile a thing. 25. But the men would
not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and
brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and
abused her all the night until the morning: and when the
day began to spring, they let her go. 26. Then came the
woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the
door of the man’s house where her lord [was], till it
was light. 27. And her lord rose up in the morning, and
opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his
way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down
[at] the door of the house, and her hands [were] upon the
threshold. 28. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be
going. But none answered. Then the man took her [up] upon
an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place.
29. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife,
and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her,
[together] with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent
her into all the coasts of Israel. 30. And it was so,
that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done
nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up
out of the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it,
take advice, and speak [your minds].”

What
morals does the reader draw out of this story? How would
you “speak your minds” after you “take advice”
and “consider of it”? I’ll tell you what I think.
This story gives me a sense of the odor exuding
out of the primitive morals that were the norm in ancient
Israel. Although in the last sentence we learn that to
butcher the body of a dead (or maybe just unconscious?)
woman into twelve pieces with a knife and send those
pieces to “all the coasts of Israel” was considered a
first (whew! — even by those moral standards), my
understanding is that the notion of sending women(*) out of the house as sexual food for hungry male
animals in order to save the males of the house was normal.
After all, we see the same story repeated in Gen 19:1–8,
with Lot being the guest of a man, and the man offering
his two virgin daughters to the mob, to save his and Lot’s
skin. Excellent! What kind of foul moral stench is this?
How can present-day believers show this to their children
and not feel their cheeks reddened with shame? But of
course, they don’t show such passages to their
children. They show only what suits them, and then insist
on the blatant lie that this “good book” is the
source and guide of their morality. Perhaps their own
parents didn’t show these passages to them, and the
saga that this book should guide their culture’s
morality keeps propagating down the generations.

Speaking of morality toward children, does
any Christian happen to know any children who have raised
their hands to hit one of their parents? Or maybe
children who just cursed their parents? Then,
according to the good book, such children should be
killed. Truly, I say unto you; here’s what it says (in
Exd 21):

15. And he that smiteth his father, or
his mother, shall be surely put to death.

17. And he that curseth his father, or
his mother, shall surely be put to death.

And if the children are not theirs, but of
their host nation, they are encouraged to kill them by
smashing them against stones. They can use as their model
what the ancient Jews were wishing for the children of
Babylon, where the Jews were kept captive (this was one
of their songs, believe it or not) (Psa 137):

8. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be
destroyed; happy [shall he be], that rewardeth thee as
thou hast served us.

9. Happy [shall he be], that taketh and
dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Believers don’t own any slaves today, I
am sure about that. But, according to their good book,
not only could they own some, but they should have
absolute control over the lives of their slaves,
according to Lev 25:44–45:

44. Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou
shalt have, [shall be] of the heathen that are round
about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
45. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do
sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their
families that [are] with you, which they begat in your
land: and they shall be your possession.

4. If his master have given [the
slave] a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters;
the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he
[the slave] shall go out by himself.

Behold, you can make some good profit by
selling even your own daughters to slavery — how about
that! Have some nice “procurements” folks! Here:

7. And if a man sell his
daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the
menservants do. 8. If she please not her master, who hath
betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be
redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have
no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. 9.
And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal
with her after the manner of daughters. 10. If he take
him another [wife]; her food, her raiment, and her duty
of marriage, shall he not diminish. 11. And if he do not
these three unto her, then shall she go out free without
money.

Wow! In other words, if your daughter’s
master doesn’t want to do all three that are required (give
her food, clothes, and “her duty of marriage”), then she’ll
walk out of this ownership relation penniless! As if it was
her fault! (Whatever the ancient Jewish lawmaker was smoking,
it must have been real gooood!)

On the other hand, so much good fortune awaits your daughters
as “maidservants”, if only “she please not her master”!
Sell them into slavery tomorrow! Except that — oops! sorry,
I forgot — believers must be men to make such a
deal. Only a man can engage in such financial arrangements
for selling his belongings, according to the above paragraph.
Just in case the believer is a woman and this escaped her
attention, let me make it abundantly clear: women are
part of their husbands’ belongings, according to ample
evidence in the good book, and as properties they cannot
arrange financial transactions.

And if you Christians dismiss all the above
as merely “Old Testament stuff”, thinking that your
morality, e.g., about slavery, is superior because it’s
based on the New Testament, here are some N.T. excerpts on
the subject:

Eph 6:5. Servants, be obedient to them that are [your]
masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling,
in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;

1Ti 6:1. Let as many servants as are under the yoke
count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the
name of God and [his] doctrine be not blasphemed.

How about that for a good cherry-picking? Or
does it sound more like onion-picking to the believer? Well,
perhaps it does, but they should understand that there are plenty
of foul-smelling onions (I didn’t even list them all) in the
book they brandish and claim that it elucidates and expounds
their morality. If the morality that they follow in their daily
lives originated from this cesspool of moral advice, today they’d
be serving long sentences behind bars.

Readers’
Reactions
Readers who read the above expressed the following
objections:

1. [Your text] shows that
you also are, as you [...] put it, “cherry picking”.
There are examples in the bible, even in the examples
that you despise, of exemplary moral attitude. I question
your objectivity in analyzing the biblical passages.
Clearly, it was for the purpose of trying to “poo-poo”
on the notion of existence of God, and not to create a
reasonable and rational argument. As you know all too
well, there are many passages which are morally strong.
They speak of protecting the orphaned and the widowed, of
not gossiping, of not bearing false witness, of not
stealing, of being industrious, of fidelity between
husband and wife, of parents not provoking their children
to wrath, and of children providing for their parents in
their old age [...].

But of course I am cherry picking! Not only didn’t I
deny this, but I even described my attitude as “onion
picking” (see the paragraph just prior to this “Readers’
Reactions”). Of course I am not
being objective in looking at the biblical passages! Did
you notice what this section is a reaction to? It is a
reaction to the idea that the Bible should serve as our
guide for morality. Look: suppose some die-hard
communists come to you and present you with a list of all
the good things that happened in communist regimes: how
the state took care of the weak, how it provided job to
everyone, and so on, and so forth. What would your
reaction be? Wouldn’t you want such people to face the
crimes commited by such regimes, as an antidote to their
mental blindness? Wouldn’t you want to tell them about
the executions for political dissent, the dislocations,
the millions that died in the Gulags under Stalin’s
rule, the poverty of the common people and the
accumulation of wealth and social benefits by the party
cadres, and all those other “onions” of communist
regimes, which eventually caused them to collapse
practically everywhere? What would you offer to such
propagandists, a balanced and scientifically documented
academic analysis of the pros and cons of communism?

Likewise, I am not interested in telling you about the
biblical passages that are morally strong: you know
them. You read them, perhaps even quite often. Why do you
want to hear from me words that are music to your ears?
You’re familiar with the music. My purpose is to bring
to your attention the fact that the “garden” which is
the Bible doesn’t have only beautifully-smelling
fruits, but onions, too, and garlic, and dead rats, and
other foul-smelling objects. You must put all of
those in the basket that you carry with you when you
claim that the Bible should serve as a guide to our
morality; that is, if you want to be objective.

2. The story of the “first
human barbeque”, Jephtah’s Daughter, which you
described in your Religion page [...], is not a story
added to the writings to say “this is how to be pious”.
It’s just a story, traditions from ancient, primitive
people. It probably started as a piece of drama, a father
who makes a stupid vow and is thus punished by losing
something dear, and someone added it in so it wouldn’t
be lost to the nation’s memory. It appears to me as
more of an expression of the superstitions they had about
vows than anything else, about how they shouldn’t be
taken so lightly. It really doesn’t matter why it is in
there, morality is not to be derived only from [stories
like that one].

I fully agree with your assessment. Jephthah’s and
other similar biblical stories are only stories,
they’re not meant to imply that our morality should be
based on them. But remember what this section is about:
it is an answer to the proposition: “Our morality comes
from God.” Most religious people (the vast majority,
nearly 100% I’d think), agree with the idea that we are
moral because God is moral, and he wants us to be like
him, “in his own image”. (Muslims, too, agree on
that.) But also according to most religious people’s
opinion (I wouldn’t venture to estimate any percent in
this case), the only way that God has used to communicate
with us is through the Bible, if we exclude the personal
communication that an individual might feel that they
have had with God (which is not a universal experience,
but rather a marginal one). So, if God is moral and wants
to tell us how to be like him, all we (who don’t have
personal experiences) can do is read the Bible. (And
Muslims would read the Qur’an.) Now, here come some
people who tell to the religious believer: “No, don’t
look at the Bible in its entirety in order to find out
what’s moral and what’s immoral! Don’t look at
this, and this, and this story, look here, and there, and
there instead!” But there’s a problem now: If we are
to believe these people, then our morality doesn’t come
from God, but from these people. After all, who are they
to decide this issue, who gave them this authority? If
they claim they got it from God, why should I believe
them? I could also claim I was suddenly given authority
from God to tell you what is moral in the Bible — why
shouldn’t you believe me? So, if we are to listen to
people, or even to our common sense about stories such as
Jephthah’s, then our morality doesn’t come from God,
contrary to the assumption that this page argues against.
(So I have nothing to disagree with, case closed.) But if
only God is responsible for telling us what is moral and
what not, then we must take the whole Bible
indiscriminately, without introducing any human bias and
cherry-picking.

Yes, but all of the
Bible? Will the author of the above
statement consider
selling his own daughter(s) to slavery, following
the Word of God?(from the website of the
Trinity Foundation)

3. Perhaps you are confusing compassion (a
recognition of someone else’s pain and an intense
desire to alleviate it) with morality (concern with the
distinction between good and evil, or right and
wrong). So what you are describing in your page as “morally
despicable,” is really more accurately described by
today’s standards as emotionally traumatic.

Do you mean that morally everything is fine in Jephtha’s
story of roasting of his own daughter, and I am only
having an emotional trauma due to my compassion for the
poor girl’s fate?

Compassion is a big and inseparable factor in our human
moral judgments. Without compassion we wouldn’t
understand morality. We would be robots, doing
calculations according to rules: “This is moral,
because according to...” Let me give you an example:
Suppose you witness a thief grabbing a purse from an old
lady; during the incident, the lady falls and is being
dragged on the ground, and the thief runs away. Is there
a morally wrong action? There is, I’m sure you’ll
agree. Can you perceive the whole event without feeling
compassion for the victim? You can’t, because you’re
not a robot. Only judges are supposed to judge without
compassion, but in theory only, because as human beings
they have feelings like other human beings, and they need
to exert effort to avoid being compassionate. But
morality is not understood in the theoretical “perfect
judge’s” fashion, but practically, in the real human
way, which almost always includes compassion for the
victim.

Most Christians believe that God is the source
of their morality. At the same time, some Christians (the
majority, I suspect) believe that God is the true author of the
Bible (that is, God inspired its authors, who wrote it with
divine guidance). But if this is true, then we must draw one of
the following two incredible conclusions:

God allowed the authors of the Bible to
make a travesty of his divine morality, as the biblical
excerpts in this section show. How could God allow the
pristine morality that he supposedly possesses — and
expects us to follow — to be distorted so savagely in
the “good book”?

Alternatively, God’s morality itself
improved during historical times. But this is something
no sane Christian would want to admit.

Since none of the above two alternatives seems
plausible, the mystery remains if we attribute the source of our
morality to God. But the mystery vanishes if we avoid this error,
attribute the source of our morality to our biological origins,
and observe the mere fact that human morality evolved in time,
and keeps evolving. We can then conclude simply that the authors
of the Bible imprinted in it the morality of their times.

2.1.2 Islamic
Sacred Texts as Guides for Morality

Did the morality of the world improve later,
several centuries after the Bible was written? Well, the “morality
of the world” is not a notion with a single value; we can’t
measure it, say, in the 3rd C. BCE and find it to have a value of 0.2, and then measure it
a thousand years later and find it to have advanced to 0.5!
Different parts of the world exhibited different moral standards
throughout time. So, moving forward to the 7th C. CE we still find examples of
barbaric, atrocious, even inhuman morality in the world
of monotheistic religions.

Specifically, we learn about the morality of
ancient Islam by reading the texts that are considered sacred in
the Islamic world. These include the Qur’an (or Koran), the Hadiths (narratives) of Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and the Sirat Rasul Allah (life of Allah’s
Messenger) by Muhammad ibn Ishaq, and al-Tabari. These texts give us a glimpse of what was considered
normal, or socially accepted, in the times of the ancient Muslims
(all except the Qur’an, because the Qur’an is supposed to be
about what Allah himself [or itself(*)] dictated to Muhammad, so it’s not a narration of
historic events). And what we learn in these texts appears
shocking to the modern reader. In particular, we learn that, in
Muhammad’s society, it was normal to kill your adversary
who criticized you! There are at least three examples in
which Muhammad himself had his opponents killed (i.e.,
instigated or directly ordered his Muslim followers to murder his
critics) because they said or wrote things against him:
(Warning: the bulleted section that
follows quotes the Islamic texts, which describe some atrocities
in graphic detail; if the reader feels that such reading
might be disturbing, I strongly urge the reader to skip the
bulleted section.)

In Sahih Bukhari we learn that Ashraf, a
Jewish poet, had written against Muhammad. Then we read:“The
Prophet said, ‘Who is ready to kill Ashraf? He has said
injurious things about Allah and His Apostle.’ Maslama
got up saying, ‘O Allah’s Apostle! Would you like me
to kill him?’ The Prophet replied, ‘Yes.’ Maslama
said, ‘Then allow me to say what I like [i.e., to
lie].’ Muhammad said, ‘I allow you.’ ” (Bukhari:Volume
4, Book 52, Number 270-271).
Here, Muhammad both suggests directly the killing of his
opponent (“Who is ready to kill Ashraf?”) and permits
lying in order to achieve it. In al-Tabari we read the
continuation: “Ashraf suspected no evil when Maslama
cried, ‘Smite the enemy of Allah!’ So they smote him,
and their swords clashed over him. Maslama said, ‘I
remembered my dagger and I seized it. I thrust it into
the lower part of his body. I bore down upon it until I
reached his genitals. Allah’s enemy fell to the ground.’
” (Tabari 7:94). Then we find the end of this story in
yet another Islamic text, the one of Muhammad ibn Ishaq:
“We carried his head back to Muhammad during the night,
saluted the Prophet as he stood praying, and cast Ashraf’s
head before his feet. The Prophet praised Allah that the
poet had been slain, and complimented us on the good work
we had done in Allah’s Cause. Our attack upon Allah’s
enemy cast terror among the Jews, and there was no Jew in
Medina who did not fear for his life.’ ” (ibn Ishaq:368)

Atrocious? Disgusting? Inhuman? Yes by our modern
standards, but not by theirs. Let’s move on. (Once
again, the reader who feels this material is disturbing
is advised to skip this bulleted section in its
entirety.)

In ibn Ishaq we learn that Asma bint Marwan, a
woman, was a writer and a poet of a tribe other than
Muhammad’s. She wrote critically of Muhammad, telling
her tribe to be wary of him, like this: “You obey a
stranger who encourages you to murder for booty. You are
greedy men. Is there no honor among you?” Then we read:
“Upon hearing those lines Muhammad said, ‘Will no one
rid me of this woman?’ Umayr, a zealous Muslim, decided
to execute the Prophet’s wishes. That very night he
crept into the writer’s home while she lay sleeping
surrounded by her young children. There was one at her
breast. Umayr removed the suckling baby and then plunged
his sword into the poet. The next morning in the mosque,
Muhammad, who was aware of the assassination, said, ‘You
have helped Allah and His Apostle.’ Umayr said, ‘She
had five sons; should I feel guilty?’ ‘No,’ the
Prophet answered. ‘Killing her was as meaningless as
two goats butting heads.’ ” (ibn Ishaq: 676)

Here we learn that even Umayr, the zealous Muslim, had
some qualms of conscience after disemboweling a woman in
her sleep, one with five children, while she was milking
one of them on her breast. And yet, Muhammad judged her
murder as no more meaningful than “two goats butting
heads”! Today, only disturbed, psychopath serial
killers show such total disrespect for human life. But
Muhammad and his followers were not psychopaths — they
were too many to be all psychopaths — nor were his
followers disturbed in the least by such behavior, for if
they were, they would abandon their leader. Simply, the
morality of those tribes, which appears inhuman to us,
was normal to them; such were their moral standards.

In ibn Ishaq once again, we read that Muhammad
and his Muslim followers had captured some people
intending to exchange them for ransom. “Halfway to
Medina, Ocba [one of the captives] was called
out to be executed.” Naturally, Ocba protested, wanting
to know why he would be executed, whereas the rest of the
captives would be kept for ransom. “The Prophet said,
‘Because of your enmity to Allah and to his Prophet.’
‘And my little girl,’ cried Ocba in bitterness, ‘who
will take care of her?’ ‘Hell Fire,’ Muhammad
responded. At that moment he was decapitated. ‘Wretch
that you were, [Muhammad said] you scoffed at me
and claimed that your stories were better than mine. I
give thanks that Allah has slain you and comforted me.’
” (ibn Ishaq: 308)

The above is only a sample of a larger whole,
not just a few and isolated incidents in which Muhammad had his
critics silenced by murder. More atrocities and inhuman behavior
are described in the Islamic holy texts, such as the brutal
torturing and eventual killing — under Muhammad’s orders —
of some thieves of camels (Bukhari:V4B52N261), the torturing and beheading of other opponents of
Muhammad’s (Tabari 8:122; ibn Ishaq:515), and more. I have written
more extensively about these in this
page, so I prefer to avoid
repetitions here. But even today, Islamist leaders follow in the
steps of the founder of their religion: in 1989, the supreme
religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie, an Indian
expatriate living in England, because Rushdie had written a novel
(“the Satanic Verses”) that, according to Muslims, was an
insult to Islam and Muhammad. More recently, a situation having a
lot of the flavor of Rushdie’s case erupted in late 2005, and
became known as the “Muhammad
cartoon controversy”,
when cartoonists depicted Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, an act
considered blasphemous in Islam. More than 100 people died in
protests that occurred in the Muslim world, and some Muslim
leaders issued death threats against the newspaper publishers and
the cartoonists themselves. That incident has been adequately
caricatured in this page.

An overall theme emerges after considering all
the above:

Islam
appears to violate a deeply-rooted human moral principle:
“Do not retaliate in a manner harsher than the way you
feel you were wronged.”
Or, to put it more simply: “Be Just.”

Interestingly, there is a Quranic verse that
nearly advocates the above rule explicitly: “Fight in the way
of Allah with those who fight with you, but do not exceed the
limits, surely Allah does not love those who exceed the limits.”
(Qur’an 2:190) But the very next verse contradicts the previous one,
continuing like this: “And kill them wherever you find them,
and drive them out from where they drove you out, [because]
persecution is worse than slaughter. But if they cease, then Allah is forgiving,
merciful.” (Qur’an 2:191–2:192).(*)

Could the morality of Muslims have originated
from Allah? Note a phrase quoted above, uttered by Muhammad to
his decapitated critic: “Allah has slain you”. Either
Muhammad was right, or he was wrong. If Muhammad was right, then Allah
slays people, decapitating them! If Muhammad was wrong and
this murder was not committed by Allah, then it was committed
by Muhammad himself — perhaps not by his own hand, but by
the hand of one of his men, which morally makes no difference at
all. In either case, either Allah or Muhammad committed a murder.
(If only it was the only one!)

Given all the
evidence that exists in their own sacred Islamic texts,
rationally thinking, I conclude that Muslims who truly believe in
their religion today can belong to one of the following three
categories:

either they are ignorant of the
character of the founder of their religion, having not
read their holy books from beginning to end;

or they are self-blindfolded,
either by living in denial of what they have read, or by
proposing this childish argument (mainly to persuade
themselves): “But there are so many virtues in Muhammad’s
character!(*)”;

or they are hypocrites, knowing
what events their texts are describing, knowing that they
are morally despicable, and yet pretending that all is
fine with their religion — after all, Islam allows
Muslims to lie to infidels, if they deem this to benefit
Islam.

I believe that, for the vast majority of today’s
Muslims, the first of the above three options is the case, given
the rampant illiteracy in the Islamic world (source). Most Muslims either don’t read about their religion
and have a hearsay knowledge of it, or are given to read only
specific excerpts from the Qur’an that are not morally
offensive. (There are plenty of morally offensive passages in the
Qur’an — a few can be found in my earlier-referenced page — but Muslims engage in the same kind of
cherry-picking with their Qur’an as Christians do with their
Bible.)

A question unrelated to morality but related to the
general issue of the evolution of religion is: What can
be the future of the religion of Islam? My personal view
is that Islam can survive — and probably will
survive — as long as there are large illiterate,
uninformed masses. I don’t mean to say that every
Muslim is illiterate! Far from doing such sweeping
generalizations, I simply observe that Islam is strongest
and has the most fanatical zealots where illiteracy is
highest: in Afghanistan (71.9%), Pakistan (50.1%),
Algeria (30.1%), Egypt (28.6%), Iraq (25.9%), Iran (23%),
Saudi Arabia (21.2%), etc. (same source).
In contrast, Islam is weakest where illiteracy in the
Muslim world is the lowest, such as in Turkey (12.6%).
Even within Turkey, there is a sharp contrast between
Western Turks, who are generally well-educated, with
incomes similar to those of neighboring European
countries, who are not observant and for whom Islam plays
a minimal role in their lives; and Eastern Turks,
generally much less educated, belonging to poorer
classes, and who are strongly religious. Islam has a love–hate
relationship with education: although most Muslims are
taught that, according to the Qur’an, they should learn
and seek knowledge in their lives (a directive tacitly
understood to apply to men only), they don’t know how
to learn. Specifically, that in order to believe
what one learns one must rely not on authority, or
hearsay knowledge, but on the original sources: reading
and researching by him/herself, and using one’s own
judgment, not relying on the imam’s opinion or
interpretation. However, I expect that knowledge about
knowledge (i.e., on how to learn) will spread in the
Islamic world, gradually and slowly, just as so many
other trends have spread worldwide. The more educated
Muslims become, the less they will allow religion to
exert control over their lives. However, poor and
uneducated people will not be magically eliminated, so I
don’t predict a totally bleak future for Islam.

2.1.2 Morality
Keeps Evolving

Not only has our present-day morality come a
long way from the wretchedness of the Bible and the Islamic
texts, so as to consider notions such as infanticide, slavery,
murder of one’s critics, and treating women as belongings of
men abominable, but we keep evolving our moral standards century
after century, decade after decade. The concept “All
men are equal” appeared only after the Enlightenment, in the
18th century.(*)

Jules Verne

But even though the concept of
equality of all human beings appeared in the 18th C., it
was not digested immediately by everybody, not even by
the intellectuals. As late as in the second half of the
19th C., Jules Verne (1828 – 1905), the Frenchman
writer considered by many as the father of science
fiction, would depict dark-skinned people (Africans,
Asians, Australian aboriginals) as semi-intelligent,
naïve brutes, good only for serving their “white”
lords. In fact, in one of his stories (“The Mysterious
Island”), there is a group of white people served by a
black slave (who is treated humanely because his white
lords are “good people”), who is in turn served by a
gorilla! — an idea that depicts graphically the
tragically erroneous view of “evolution” by many
intellectuals in Verne’s time: the great apes evolved
to “niggers”, who evolved to “whites” — thus
explaining the supposed superiority of “whites”. (It
is a superiority of technological nature, which was
erroneously thought to be of intellectual nature; I
discuss its origin in this article.)

Another famous writer
of science fiction, the British H. G. Wells (1866 – 1946) wrote
the following in a utopian work of his,[22] in 1902:

And the ethical system of these men of the
New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the
world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the
procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in
humanity — beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful
minds [...] —and to check the procreation of base and
servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that
is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits
of men. [...] And the method that nature has followed
hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was
prevented from propagating weakness, [...] the method that
must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is
death. In the new vision death is [...] the merciful
obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things. [p. 298]

The men of the New Republic will not be
squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death [...]. They
will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while;
[p. 300]

All such killing will be done with an
opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or
dreadful, [...] If deterrent punishments are used at all in
the code of the future, the deterrent will neither be death,
nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the life by
imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but good
scientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a
memory. [p. 301]

And how will the New Republic treat the
inferior races? How will it deal with the black? [...] the
yellow man? [...] that alleged termite in the civilized
woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. [...] It
will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall
behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and
difficult [p. 315]

And for the rest, those swarms of black,
and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not
come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a
world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will
have to go. [...] So far as they fail to develop sane,
vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world
of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.
[p. 317]

Yes, this was written in 1902. Doesn’t it
sound more like the ramblings of Adolph Hitler, or one of his
close associates, Goebbels, maybe? Yet it was penned down by H.
G. Wells, an intellectual (and a supposed progressive!) of the
time. If
Wells could write like this, endorsing the most despicable and
reprehensible form of Social Darwinism,(*) one cannot avoid thinking, is it any wonder that the
Holocaust followed only four decades later in Nazi Germany? Today
we read such passages with horror (and shame for the thoughts
entertained by fellow humans), but back then — only a century
ago, mind you — the word and concept “genocide” did not
exist, nor had the world been “burned” yet with the wounds of
World War II.

And yet, our moral awareness continued growing.
Women’s right to vote (suffrage) was established in the U.S.A.
only in 1920 (with the 19th Amendment), and this was among the
first places in the world where women could vote (though not the
first; women had already gained suffrage by the end of the 19th
C. in places like Britain, Australia, and New Zealand). African
Americans did not gain suffrage in all States until well into the
1960’s (by the Voting Rights Act of 1965). The notion “one
person, one vote” is indeed very recent (and is usually
thoughtlessly quoted as “one man, one vote”).

What about today? Are there any moral precepts
for which we should feel shame, causing our descendants to write
derogatorily about us, despising our standards? Sure there are.
For example, we often treat animals in ways that cause them to
suffer greatly. I envisage a “golden rule” of the future for
animal treatment that will be approximately as follows:

Animals
should be treated in accordance with their cognition,
hence with their ability to perceive their own suffering.

Thus, a fly has no way of perceiving anything
about itself, because its cognition does not afford it such an
achievement — it is merely an intricate reacting device. The
only reason for which I do not harm flies — or other creatures
for that matter — is because I see them as marvels of what the
evolution on our planet can achieve. But the cognition of a
chimpanzee is sufficiently complex to allow the animal to
represent in its mind its own self, its immediate future, its
possible suffering at present, etc. — not in as complex a way
as a human being, but close enough. Experiments harming great
apes have now largely subsided, but we are not yet at the stage
of litigating for the rights of animals, and punishing the
violators of law. Many scientists continue administering their
lethal experiments on monkeys and other smart mammals, mainly in
the U.S.A. Other nations, such as Japan and Norway (both among
the nations with the highest per capita income), continue killing
whales, unashamedly. The Chinese contribute to the killing of
rhinos, because they have the largely bogus belief that an
extract from the horn of a rhino has beneficial medicinal
effects. Many Asian cultures still value and use ivory, thus
encouraging poaching that eliminates elephants in Africa. The
term “animal genocide” is still unknown, even unthinkable: we
are not there yet. All the same, one day these nations will be
condemned by history, as our descendants will write it.

2.2 Evolution of Rituals

[This sub-section is not ready yet.]

3. Properties of the Religious Mind

3.1 Is Rationality Appropriate for
Understanding Religion?

A few days after the Christmas of 2007, a
correspondent from South Africa wrote to me a letter in which he
expressed an idea that has been repeated often by believers (and
has not been well-received by non-believers): that religion
cannot be understood rationally and scientifically because it
requires faith, and faith is the opposite of rational thinking.
When you believe something, you believe, you don’t
seek to explain why you believe. Here is a short excerpt of the
argument, in my correspondent’s own words:

“I felt that I, as a Christian, might
just elucidate af few crucial points that non-believers
misunderstand about Christianity. The main point I would like
to demonstrate to you in due course is that Christianity
cannot be approached along intellectual lines at all. In
other words, one cannot come to a satisfactory knowledge
about God and about Christ through any intellectual enquiry
as such. There is, interestingly, ample evidence in Scripture
for that. [...] Were I to engage with you in such a debate,
my objective would not so much have been to persuade you of
the truth of the Bible, as rather endeavouring to get you to
doubt the reliability of science a little more [...]”

Note that although my correspondent argued with
Christianity in mind, the exact same argument could be advanced
by Muslims. They, too, would argue that God (Allah) cannot be
approached by reason. After all, the notion of submission
to God without questioning is central in Islam. Because
Christianity and Islam account for a very large percent of today’s
believers, I will not specialize the argument to Christianity but
will generalize it to “religion”, with the understanding that
it might not apply to some other, non-mainstream religions.

Other believers have proposed an analogy that
might appear particularly illuminating. Think of a piece of art,
they say: a painting, for example. Would you be able to
appreciate the art in the painting by reason alone? Would you
expect to use logical rules, such as: “If the red hue on the
upper-right corner on the canvas is between 128 and 184, then...”?
Or: “If the logarithm of luminosity exceeds the square root of
saturation at pixel [1054, 3582], then...”? No, come on, art
cannot be appreciated by means of any set of such rules. It must
be felt.Likewise, religion is felt by the believer’s
“heart”,(*) it does not require nor expect any justification from
the microscope of the reasoning mind. This just cannot be
digested well by some non-believers’ stomachs, who want
rationality to be always at work.

But non-believers have their own argumentation,
too. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa has described
philosophical theology as “intellectual tennis without a net”,
an idea that is best explained by D. C. Dennett in the following
excerpt (Dennett is speaking to an imaginary believer who claims
that reasoning has no place in religion):[24]

I have [...] been assuming without comment
or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was
up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It’s your
serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as
follows: “What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich
wrapped in tinfoil. That’s not much of a God to worship!”
If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can
logically justify my claim that your serve has such a
preposterous implication, I will reply: “Oh, do you want
the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either
the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there
are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug’s game if
there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the
assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by
playing with the net down.”
Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a
reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra
category of belief worthy of special consideration, I’m
eager to play. [p. 154]

Instead of reasoning about faith, my
correspondent argued that this must not be done, and that,
indeed, this is the error that believers often do: they engage in
argumentation with non-believers, and so the believers implicitly
agree to play with the rules of the non-believers, since reason
is needed to conduct even the simplest intellectual discussion
— lest one would be free to make the most ridiculous
statements, as Dennett demonstrated. Believers shouldn’t argue
(read: reason), they should just believe, my
correspondent claimed.

And yet, such correspondents evidently keep
reading this text at least up to the point that caused them to
compose an email message and send it to me. They have the
curiosity to go through a large part of this article and see what
is said in it. And they use their reasoning ability to
do so, because without reason not even a Mickey Mouse story can
be understood. So believers have two options, it seems: either
follow my correspondent’s advice and stop reading now
because this is a text that reasons about religion (though it’s
already too late, since this is an advanced point in the text),
or keep reading, but with the understanding that they do
something they probably shouldn’t be doing.

Will you keep reading, dear reader, in case you
are a believer? Do you have the intellectual curiosity to see how
I will argue that reason (through science, in particular) can
approach and perhaps explain religious feelings, at least in
principle? I bet you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading
this. But
even if you don’t agree that science can eventually
(after several decades) explain religious feelings, I am sure
that — if you are open-minded enough — you agree that science
should be given a chance to attempt it. For it is one thing to
say “I don’t believe it can be done”, and quite another to
say “I don’t want it to be done”. If you don’t
want it, fine, this means you’re not willing to be personally
involved in the scientific exploration of religious feelings, but
at least you shouldn’t interfere or obstruct those who want to
do it. If you simply don’t believe it can be done, then you
could sit back and watch those who sweat, trying to do it. If
they eventually fail, this will be your intellectual triumph. But until then,
you must be patient. Because it is too early to issue a judgment,
all I can do now is to outline what efforts have — perhaps
timidly — started being made in an attempt to provide a
scientific explanation of religious feelings.

At this point I’d like to mention briefly an
argument put forth by atheists quite often, because it will be
treated more properly in §5.1. First, believers say: “Is
there any difference between a believer’s faith in God, and a
non-believer’s faith in rationality? In the end, they both
require faith! Isn’t it obvious that the moment you opt for
rationality as your mental tool you’ve made an arbitrary
choice, which cannot be justified on the basis of rationality
itself, because that would amount to circular reasoning?”

To this, some atheists retort as follows: “Your
computer works because rationality and the sciences that rest on
using reason predict that it will. Look around you and try to
realize how many of the objects that you see — including such
low-tech things as the walls of the multistory building in which
you possibly reside — would be impossible without the
scientific reasoning method. So, faith in rationality and faith
in faith are not exactly on par with each other! The former
produces results and makes correct predictions about the world,
whereas the latter produces nothing tangible, and has made no
prediction of a repeating event that has been repeatedly verified
(to bar chance prediction of single-instance events).”

This answer of atheists refers to the practicality
of religion: it is only relevant if we request practical and —
obviously — positive results from religion in people’s lives.
In that case, the question becomes: “Which is better as a
benefactor in people’s lives, science, or religion?” (Perhaps
they are both benefactors, and one must decide the use of one
over the other only in those issues where the two disagree,
giving conflicting answers; this will be examined in §4.3.)
But the believer is not required to focus on the practical
aspects of religion. For many believers, religion is important
because of its spiritual help and guidance, not because of its
ability to explain the natural world, or to predict its future.
Insisting that religion produce practical results is akin to
requiring the same of art. We don’t have to request this from
religion, just as, for instance, we don’t require from a
painting by Rembrandt to make verifiable predictions and create
tangible products (other than attempts to copy or steal it).

No, my correspondent’s argument was not about
the practicality of religion; it was a theoretical, a
logical one. My corresponding believer made a solid, rational
argument, which is this: the moment we find a rational
explanation for why rationality is preferable over faith in
approaching religion, we have fallen into the vortex of circular
reasoning: we used rationality to justify itself.

But the believers are not exactly pure and
innocent in this debate: they use reasoning — plain
mathematical logic, actually — to force non-believers to admit
that they cannot justify rationality, i.e., that rationality must
be taken as an axiom; and then, the moment they achieve this,
they drop the tool they made an excellent use of, and cry
triumphantly, “Now let me use only my faith, okay?” That’s
exactly what Dennett was complaining about: believers use the net
of reason only as a fence against the opponent’s serve — for
as long as it suits the believer — but drop the net when it’s
their turn to serve.

To summarize this theoretical debate,
non-believers are guilty of trying to lift themselves off the
ground by pulling up their own bootstraps, and believers are
guilty of shameful duplicity, changing the rules in mid-game to
suit their purposes.

Must we
conclude then that believers and non-believers speak different
languages, and never the twain shall meet? What alternative is
there other than considering reason and faith (read: science and
religion) as two different domains that must not interfere with
each other? Must we accept Stephen Jay Gould’s proposal that
science and religion constitute two “Non-Overlapping
Magisteria” (NOMA’s)?[25] In Gould’s view, each “magisterium” occupies a
separate realm of human cognition. Science informs us how the
natural world works, and religion informs us how we ought to
behave morally. Each magisterium is separate, and they should not
interfere with each other.

Gould’s idea of NOMA’s has been rejected by
Dawkins,[13] who argued that the notion that there exists a
super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed
and created the universe and everything in it, including us, is a
scientific hypothesis, and is therefore not exempt from
scientific examination. But my correspondent’s idea (which I
suspect is shared by many other believers) is not about
God-as-Creator of the physical world (which, admittedly, is a
physical problem), but about God-as-Redeemer (for Christians),
and as Recipient of Personal Communication that takes place
between the believer and God (for believers of most major
religious denominations). It’s a personal, subjective
issue, one that doesn’t admit rationality to creep in — so
believers would say.

But here is a way in which although rationality
cannot prove faith wrong, i.e., it cannot completely
dethrone and kick away faith (for we concluded that, logically
thinking, this leads to circular reasoning), it is possible that
rationality can paint religious faith into a corner. Indeed, if that
happens, the “corner” will be so narrow that to keep on
relying on faith in the face of the alternative, rational
explanation of religion would border on the comical, in the same
sense that believing today that the Earth is flat is comical.(*) The earlier phrase “if that happens” means that we
are not there yet; we don’t have the necessary knowledge to
conclude the analogous of a “round Earth” conclusion in the
rationality vs. faith controversy; but we’re getting there. The
following analogy might help understand the idea.

Consider how
our knowledge of the creation of stars was modified. Until
only a century ago the account of Genesis 1 was a serious
contender for an explanation of how stars were made, even
among some scientists of that time. Because telescopes were
not powerful enough yet, people thought that stars had been
created once and for all. Even the dying supernovas, which
were perceived as new stars (hence the “nova” in the
term), are so rare that they didn’t pose a serious threat
to the belief that “God made the stars”. (Jews and
Christians believe this to have been the fourth day of
creation; Muslims believe that Allah made the stars during
the creation, as the Koran affirms, but not at a specified
time.)

But recently we started learning new things
about stars. The power of telescopes increased to the point
of allowing astronomers to see snapshots of star formation at
any stage during their birth. You turn your telescope to some
bright diffuse nebula, such as the one shown in the picture
on the left, and see the material that will turn into stars
after millions of years. Then you turn your telescope to the
constellation Taurus,

Nebula around star η Carina
(credit: STScl/NASA)

The open cluster M45 (the Pleiades)
(credit: NASA/ESA/HST)

Our Sun
(image made by the program Celestia)

and see the Pleiades (middle picture), an
“open cluster” of stars born only around 100 million
years ago (that’s recent in astronomical standards). You
see the stars still wrapped in the dust that gave rise to
them. This was dust just like the one shown in the picture on
the left, but, given the time that passed, it got condensed
into the stars that we see in the middle picture, with some
visible amount of it still floating around. As time goes by,
the dust disperses, resulting in stars that appear isolated,
like our Sun (image on the right), which has an age of around
5 billion years. But once upon a time the Sun was a member of
an open cluster, which included Sirius, α Centauri, Procyon,
and other neighboring stars. We learned that the dust becomes
condensed into stars because it collapses under its own
gravity. As it collapses and becomes denser and denser at
some random spots, the extreme force of gravity causes
nuclear reactions to start. The more the amount of dust that
accumulates the more powerful the nuclear reactions become,
which exert a pressure opposing gravity and thus prevent the
material to collapse any further. Stars are the balancing
experts between gravity and nuclear power. And nuclear
reactions (explosions, like those of hydrogen bombs) provide
the energy that causes stars to shine.

Once we understood this, God was eliminated
from the star-creation picture. It is not necessary to invoke
God for the creation of stars, any more than it is to invoke
him for the creation of water droplets in a cloud. Indeed,
the analogy is quite accurate. Clouds become denser and
denser in the atmosphere of the Earth (owing to
meteorological phenomena that are more or less random), and
if it happens that their density is very large (and the
temperature and pressure suitable), water droplets are formed
at random places, which descend to the ground and are
observed by us as rain. No God. If we were bacteria whose
life depended crucially on those droplets (especially the big
droplet in which we were all living), then we might have
invented a story relating how a Supreme Bacterial Architect
created the droplets in the heaven at day-whatever. But we’re
people, and for our scale of sizes it is the gravity-droplets
(stars) that are important, especially the big bright
gravity-droplet that circles the sky of the Earth daily and
gives us the energy we need to move around.

That our knowledge about star creation would
grow and change the status of the Genesis 1 story from
matter-of-fact to oh-it’s-an-allegory was not evident at all
one century ago, because back then knowledge was missing.
Could it be that, likewise, we now live in times during which it
is not evident at all that future science, through observation
and reasoning, will illuminate and explain religious faith,
turning it to nothing more than a special mode of mental
operation? I think so, but note that here I am expressing only my
personal bias. I might be wrong, and it is only the overall
evidence (including future one) that will tell us if I am right
or not. The evidence that makes me having this hunch exists and
keeps coming, although at a rate that implies that my lifetime
might not suffice to witness the complete scientific explanation
of the religious mind. Still, some evidence is already
here. Specifically, here is how rationality encroaches little by
little in the realm of faith, and how scientific research gnaws,
bit by bit, at the throne of the magisterium of religion:

There is a lot of work being done recently on the subject of the
evolutionary foundations of human morality. Traditionally, to be
moral has been considered a “spiritual” task, with the
understanding that “spiritual” is supposed to be in
opposition to “material”. (Recall also that in Gould’s NOMA’s, the “magisterium of religion” presumably informs
us how we ought to behave morally.) A minor point has already
been discussed above, where it was shown by simulation that it is not a
chance event that we generally support the morally good and
punish the evil, since animal species that do otherwise have
fewer chances to survive. But much more substantial work has been
done (also discussed in the literature, at the end) that provides
evidence that morality has not been sent to us from God, or asked
of us by God, but that it evolved in us just as all other
properties of ours evolved: from lower origins through natural
selection. Morality is a foundational pillar of religion. This
pillar is currently being sawed. If it is finally severed and
tumbles down, the throne of the magisterium might be engaged in a
desperate (but futile) balancing act.

Research is conducted on
mystical experiences during meditation and other moments of
isolation, concentration, etc. Neuroscientists like Andrew
Newberg (Penn State U.) examine the brain while it is engaged in,
e.g., Tibetan Buddhist meditation.[26] After the
study, the subjects describe in words the feelings that are often
associated with intense meditation. A subject said that,
concentrating on a mental image, he focused and focused, quieting
his conscious mind, until something he identified as his true
inner self emerged. It felt “timeless and infinite”, a part
of everyone and everything in existence. Meditators often report
feelings of touching infinity. A Franciscan nun, Sister Celeste,
said: “I felt communion, peace, openness to experience...
[There was] an awareness and responsiveness to God’s presence
around me, and a feeling of centering, quieting, nothingness, [as
well as] moments of fullness of the presence of God. [God was]
permeating my being.” Newberg scanned her brain, and during her
most intensely religious moments, when she felt a palpable sense
of God’s presence and an absorption of her self into his being,
her brain displayed some changes similar to those observed in
Tibetan monks. Specifically, there is an area in the brain
nicknamed the “orientation association area”, that tells us
where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. (This area
is in the superior parietal lobe, for neurologically savvy
readers — see figure, below.) In particular, the left
orientation area creates the sensation of a physically delimited
body, and the right orientation area creates the sense of the
physical space in which the body exists. This area is always
active as long as we are conscious. But during the intense
moments of those people’s meditation it went blank. It turned
off, ceasing to provide information about where the body ends,
presumably causing the feeling of “becoming one with the
universe”. It is important to note that they turned it off: the meditators did,
having acquired the skill to do it, through their years of
practicing meditation. Of course, nobody told them, “You have
to switch the orientation area in your parietal lobe off!”,
anymore than one needs to tell you that you must activate a
particular area in the frontal lobe of your brain if you want to
use your rationality (see figure, left side). No, the meditator
learns to do some routine by practice, and the brain does its
work. But by using neuro-imaging machines we see which regions in
the brain are responsible for some sensations, and we understand
why.

Diagram of the human brain, showing
the areas mentioned in this text.
The eyes are situated on the left side, just under the
frontal lobe.

Now, I wrote above that the meditators did this
switching off of the orientation area of their brain, and thus
reported the mystical experience — the Tibetan monks felt one
with the universe, the nun united with God. But one might retort
that this doesn’t prove that there is nothing external to
the brain that causes the switch-off. It might be that a
supernatural power switches off that part of the brain, allowing
you to have the mystical experience. However, this is not a very
convincing thought. For one thing, it would reduce God to a
mindless automaton. You concentrate in your meditating way whenever
you want, and, if you are skillful enough, God is there (supposedly causing
your orientation area to switch off). You stop, and God ceases tinkering with
your brain. You concentrate again, you get God with his “spiritual
screwdrivers”. You cease, God whisks away. Aw, come on! This can’t be God! Such
an automaton that obeys fully your volition — come! – leave! – come back! – go
away! — seems less intelligent than an elevator.

Still, I appreciate the thought that, just as
the visual cortex evolved to allow us perceive (see) real
external objects, maybe regions in the parietal and temporal
lobes evolved (or were designed like that by God) to allow us
perceive real external entities of the “spiritual”
realm. Sure, it’s a possibility. And just as I agree that it is
a possibility, religious people might want to reciprocate by
admitting that it is a possibility that the religious sense is a
purely internal mental state, independent of the external world
(spiritual or otherwise), akin to the sense of hunger, the organ
of which (the digestive system) perceives not an external world
but our internal need for food. As I wrote in the beginning of
this section, we don’t know yet. To form an informed opinion,
one must first acquire as much knowledge as possible on this and
all related subjects.

Readers’
Reactions
A reader who read the above had the following interesting experience to
share:

I was once a Christian believer until I
started asking the hard questions which were never sated with religious
explanations. Currently firm in my reasoning that there is no god, I am
always open to exploring new ideas and was interested to read your
section about the parietal lobe giving an experience of “oneness”.

During my time as a Christian, I recall the tingling feeling that came
during times of prayer or singing in groups. I want to explore this
feeling to try and understand where it comes from. It’s a good feeling
and one that most certainly validates a person’s belief and gives
credibility to religions.

So [...] I started experimenting on trying to get the same good feeling
without any religious connotations. I replaced god with my favorite
foods, the more unhealthy the better :) and instead of thinking that god
is going to grant me eternal life, my favorite foods are going to do the
same thing and the more I eat it the greater my eternal life will be. It
was pretty easy to get the same spiritual feelings that I had before.

I was thinking that maybe my body is reacting at a cellular level to a
notion that life is going to go on for ever.

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is that you have to be
careful with such experiments! You wouldn’t want to end up weighing 300
lbs just to prove the “spirituality” feeling can arise out of mundane
things, not only by praying to God!
Ha, ha!
But, that aside, your experiment — and even the idea to conduct
such an experiment — is ingenious, truly brilliant! If what you’re
reporting is true, I would venture to ask researchers who conduct
experiments on such matters to include other — and healthier!
—
possibilities; such as playing one’s favorite computer games for some
time, or reading literature of one’s favorite kind, or poetry, or
listening to music, and so on.

But, you know, not everyone can perform
your experiment. I, for example, can’t. Only people with an inborn
ability to feel that “spirituality” feeling can do it, and I wasn’t born
with that ability, which is one that can’t be learned. Usually, however,
people with that ability are already religious and happy with their
faith, not interested in doing experiments that could shake their
beliefs. Only in rare cases such as yours — of a person born with the
ability, who used to be religious and has felt it, but who later lost
his faith, and moreover had the curiosity to explore his feeling of
“spirituality” — can such an experiment be conducted. So, you are a rare
case, I think, and I feel privileged that you shared your experience
with me. I also thank you for allowing me to include it in the present
text, so that others learn about it.

Hearing
voices and seeing visions: It has long been noted that
temporal-lobe epilepsy seems to trigger vivid, Joan of Arc-type
religious visions and voices. Famous people like Dostoevsky,
Saint Paul, Saint Teresa of Avila, Proust and others are thought
to have had temporal-lobe epilepsy, leaving them obsessed with
matters of the spirit. However, temporal-lobe epilepsy is not
necessary to hear inner voices, nor the only cause of such
phenomena. Inner voices can also be triggered by anxiety,
personal crisis, lack of oxygen, low blood sugar, and simple
fatigue. Note that one way to induce such states is through
religious fasting. But they can also be caused to appear on demand in the
lab, by wearing a helmet equipped with electromagnets that
trigger electrical activity in the temporal lobes (at the bottom
in the figure of the brain, above), as Michael Persinger of
Laurentian University in Canada has shown. Persinger, a
researcher in neuroscience, having a perfectly healthy temporal
lobe, applied his device first on himself and reported
having felt the presence of God.[27] Regarding hearing voices, what is suspected is this:
the temporal lobes of the brain seem to be important in speech
perception. One experience common to many spiritual states is
hearing the voice of God. It seems to arise when you misattribute
inner speech (the “little voice” in your head that you hear
even while reading, and you know you generate yourself) to
something outside yourself. During such experiences, the brain’s
“Broca’s area” (responsible for speech production, see
figure) switches on. Most of us can tell this is our inner voice
speaking. But when sensory information is restricted, as happens
during meditation or prayer, people are “more likely to
misattribute internally generated thoughts to an external source”
suggests psychologist Richard Bentall of the University of
Manchester in England in the book “Varieties of Anomalous
Experience”.[in
26](The American psychologist Julian Jaynes went as far — too far, in my
opinion(*) — as to suggest that ancient peoples could not
attribute their inner voices to themselves, and were thus
misattributing it to a god, or gods.[28]) The same is
true for visual experiences: normally we understand that an
imagined image is generated by us; but under special conditions
the brain ceases to receive external input (from the eyes) and
misattributes the source of its own imagination to the external
world. People in such states generate a virtual world, which they
believe exists independently — after all, they see it,
and seeing is believing. I never experienced anything like this
firsthand, but have had the pleasure to discuss with people who
did. One such person, corresponding with me, reported that at
times he felt the presence of something, which he attributed to
the Jewish God, “about four feet away” from him. This was
only a “presence”, not a vision, and the presence didn’t
speak words, but instead approved or disapproved my correspondent’s
thoughts.

“I
went to the other world and returned”: People who
suffered a serious car-accident, or other accident of similar
severity (e.g., bomb explosion at near distance, or of a gas
bottle, etc.), have at times described weird experiences. Some
have said that they felt being transported through a long tunnel,
at the far end of which there was a bright light. (What happens
when they reach the end of the tunnel varies from case to case.)
Others describe an even stranger situation: they felt being
levitated, and stayed afloat for a while over their own dead
body. That is, they could see a body, which they identified as
their familiar own one, and which appeared lifeless after the
accident, whereas their existence (their “soul”, presumably)
stayed floating a few feet above the dead body. Instead of
treating such descriptions as fanciful stories, and even
sometimes poking fun at them, I believe they should be taken
seriously as incidents that show us what’s possible to occur in
extreme situations, when many regions of the brain have suffered
lesions simultaneously. I have no clue on what the cause of the
“tunnel experience” might be; the experience of levitation
and floating over the “dead” body, however, seems to imply a
situation in which both the parietal and temporal lobes are
malfunctioning. With their parietal lobe “tweaked”, victims
do not have sense of the limits and position of their bodies,
hence the brain might be giving wrong information regarding where
the self is located within space. With their temporal lobe “tweaked”
as well, victims do not understand that the image they “see”
did not originate from the external world, but is an internal
product of their own making (see previous paragraph). Also,
rational judgment (frontal lobe) is likely to be compromised as
well in such a situation, so victims cannot make observations
about what they “see”, which in a normal state of mind would
tell them that something is wrong, something is logically
incongruous in that image.

All the above experiences fall squarely into
what people describe as “spiritual”. Without detailed
knowledge of how the brain works, the feeling during such
experiences is that an external “spiritual world” is directly
perceived, and causes the experiences. But by studying the brain
we learn that more economical explanations exist, which avoid the
innumerable unanswered questions raised by the admission of the
existence of a “spiritual world”, and according to which
various regions of the brain turn off or on, and cause us to
misattribute the source of our experiences from an internally
generated to an external source. In ancient times (and even in
our times to some extent, depending on culture) people used to
believe that dreams come externally to us, sent by some deity.
But today most sensible people understand that dreams are
internal creations of our subconscious. Religious experiences are
usually more intense than dreams, and happen under special
conditions, so they’re less readily accessible and have been
studied to a lesser degree. But when their cognitive functioning
is thoroughly understood, there is little doubt that the “magic”
(read: “spirituality”) will be explained away. This does not
mean that people will cease enjoying spiritual moments; only that
they will not be misattributing their source to external agents.

So this is the sense in which the rationality
of science can help us understand spirituality. It is not
possible ever to be absolutely sure that there is no external
spiritual world because, for all our thorough understanding of
human cognition in the future, it might be that the spiritual
world wants to make us believe that when we examine the brain
thoroughly we explain spirituality away; so the spiritual world
tricks us to believe that it doesn’t exist. Certainly, it could
be. Likewise, you can’t ever be absolutely certain that there
is no Ghostly Leprechaun acting to contract the biceps brachii
muscle every time you flex your forearm. It might be that
although you think you understand perfectly how the biceps
brachii and the other muscles of your arm work — especially if
you are a doctor — there is still a Ghostly Leprechaun who
causes your muscular cells to contract, and tricks you to believe
that it doesn’t exist because of your full understanding of
muscular functions. Of course. But it is more economical to
believe that there is no Ghostly Leprechaun since it’s
redundant, and, from a certain point of view, it is saner.

When did I realize I was God?
Well, I was praying
and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
Peter O’Toole

3.1.1 Does the Religious Mind
Avoid, and Can even Be Hostile to Reason?

The rest of this document is
being written,
but not all of it is ready for public exposure yet.(You can see the remaining topics — some of them already
developed — below.)

3.2 The Hardwired Component of
Religion

3.3 Confusing what is desirable to
believe with what just is

3.4 Why is Religion hostile to
Sexuality?

4. Dangers from Religion

4.1 On the Inability to Put Oneself
in Another Person’s Shoes

4.2 Having God on Our Tribe’s
Side: the Justification of Homicide

4.3 Is There a Conflict Between
Science and Religion?

One issue that could be perceived as “danger from religion” is
the purported conflict between science and religion: as religion is the older
attempt of the human intellect to explain the world, it encroaches into domains
that increasingly become amenable to study by the newer attempt, which is
science. If religion gives us false explanations for natural phenomena (e.g.,
creation of stars, emergence of life, emergence of our species, cause of
disease, basis of morality, etc.), then it is an impediment to human progress.
But is there really a conflict? Do science and religion compete against each
other?

Sometimes knowledgeable and well-meaning people state that, in
their opinion, there is no conflict between science and religion, because each
one is only applicable in its own domain: science on the world of nature, and
religion on the world of metaphysics, including morality. An example of this
sort of thinking was discussed earlier (see the biologist’s
Stephen Jay Gould’s view).

My impression is that such people, though indeed well-meaning,
peaceful, and motivated by politeness, ignore the most fundamental principle in
science, which is understood in the exact opposite way in religion. First, I
would like to introduce the heart of the conflict between science and religion in a
light-hearted manner, by means of a quite well-known cartoon:

The content of the above cartoon is captured in a more concise
way as follows:

Science:
“Data is primary;
belief must be grounded on data.”

Religion:
“Belief is primary;
data is expected to support belief.”

Scientists will of course agree with the statement on the
left, because there is nothing more unscientific than having beliefs and
opinions that are not founded on observations, i.e., data.

Some religious people, however, might disagree with the
statement on the right, because they are of the impression that they
base at least some of their beliefs on data and observations. What they miss is that what they
call “observations” and “data” are either (1) mere opinions of other people, not
real data, or (2) not truly elementary data but interpretations (according to their beliefs) of elementary data;
in other words, they are theories that attempt to explain the data.
Here is an example of case (1):

Islam, which is one of the major religions of the world (in
terms of number of adherents), claims that the holy books of Christianity (the
New and Old Testament) and of Judaism (the Torah, which includes several of the
books of what Christians call “the Old Testament”) have been changed in content
and are thus corrupt; i.e., their original content as given by God was
different, but people corrupted the texts as time went by. Hence — Muslims claim
— their Qur’an represents the true and uncorrupted word of God (Allah). Although
it is a fact that there have been some changes in the texts of the Bible, as the
scribes that copied them throughout the centuries (before the invention of
typography) made some errors while copying, however, there is
not a single shred of evidence showing that the books of Christianity
and Judaism have been changed as drastically in content as it would be
necessary for the Qur’an to be correct. Rather the
opposite is true, judging from the most ancient extant texts of the Old and New
Testament, which predate the Qur’an: compared to them, the Qur’an appears
as if it is their caricature — as if Muhammad, the author of the Qur’an, asked
scribes to write down whatever he
could remember from the Old & New Testament by heart, omitting important parts,
having serious gaps in his knowledge of those books, and as if he was
illiterate, unable to read them so as to refresh his memory. (Muhammad’s
illiteracy, by the
way, is something the Muslims agree on.) But Muslims
believe the exact opposite: that the Qur’an (the newcomer) is the correct text,
whereas the Bible (predating the Qur’an) is the corrupted one. Muslims fail to
realize that this is a mere opinion of theirs, not based on evidence. When they are asked why
they believe so, they reply that the answer is in the Qur’an itself; and why is
the Qur’an correct? Because the Qur’an — they say — is the word of Allah, and
that’s where the questioning must stop. In other
words, their belief that Allah recorded his word in the Qur’an is primary;
everything else is a derivative of that primary belief.

Now here is another, well-known
example of case (2):

The religious person observes the stars one dark, moonless,
starry night, and — awestruck by the magnificence of the spectacle — concludes
that a supernatural power, namely God, must have created all that magic. Religious people use the
awe, which the starry sky causes them to feel, as their basis for the conclusion
that an intelligence far greater than the human one must be responsible for what
their eyes witness.

The elementary data in this case is that which our eyes
witness; i.e., the stars. The awe is not an elementary datum, but rather a
subjective feeling, which some people experience but others do not; in
any case, the awe is a psychological phenomenon, not part of the objective world
of data out there. Finally, to reach the conclusion that God must be the creator
of the universe the religious person makes two more hidden assumptions: (a) that
something ordered and complex (such as the stars) can only be created by something
which is even more ordered, complex, and intelligent; and (b) that the Higher
Intelligence that created the stars is the God they believe in. Both (a) and (b)
are not necessarily true: (a) is demonstrably false, and (b) is a logical non
sequitur. Specifically regarding (a), ordered structures appear out of
simpler ones all the time in nature. One such example is the various
crystals, which are ordered structures that were created out of unordered
matter by the application of purely natural forces, following the laws of
physics as we know them (see the pictures that follow). But even the stars themselves were created out of
unordered interstellar dust by mere application of physical laws, as we are now
in a position to know. So there is no need to insert a Higher Intelligence into
the picture of star creation. At best, such an Intelligence could be introduced
to “explain” the specific laws of physics that we witness in our universe; but
given those laws, the stars are a natural consequence of them. And regarding
(b), even if our universe was designed by a Higher Intelligence with its
specific laws of physics as we know them so that one day we humans could exist,
it simply doesn’t follow logically that that Higher Intelligence is the God that
most people in the world (Christians and Muslims) believe in. It could be a
Higher Intelligence who enjoys creating universes in a Super Lab, doing it as
part of an experiment, but who has none of the other properties that religious
people attribute to God (omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving, all-merciful, etc). Thus, whereas the true data are what our eyes see (i.e., the
stars), the religious person misuses the true data concluding an unwarranted
conclusion about the existence of the particular god they believe in.

A hexagonal crystal of ice that landed on the
windshield of the
author’s car one
winter day and was captured by his camera.

The above pictures show examples of ordered matter that occurs
naturally. Order is regularly created out of disorder in nature by
following the laws of physics. Supernatural intervention is not
necessary.

From the above fundamental principle a second one follows, in which science and
religion come to a headlong clash:

Science: No
belief is absolute;
every belief must be questioned.

Religion:
belief is absolute;
belief cannot be questioned.

It should be quite clear, I hope, that the above conflict of
principles is a consequence of the one mentioned earlier. If, from the
scientific point of view, observations (data) are primary and beliefs must be
grounded on data, then it follows that beliefs are dependent on data. No
belief can be considered absolute, or eternal, because new data might cast doubt
on it in the future. In contrast, from the religious point of view, since
beliefs are primary, they form the “axioms” of the religious belief system, and
as axioms they cannot be questioned.

The idea that religious beliefs must remain unquestionable has
cost, at times, the freedom, or even the lives of freethinkers. Among the
well-known historical cases is the one of Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno,
who was burned at the stake in 1600, found guilty of heresy by the Roman
Inquisition of the Catholic Church. Bruno supported the heliocentric system,
which contradicted “the spirit of the scripture”, as the Inquisition declared.
Thirty-three years later, another Italian, Galileo Galilei — a figure of highest
eminence in the history of science — was threatened by torture for the same
reason and by the same Inquisition, and was forced to recant his beliefs and
stay under house arrest for the rest of his life. Nearly 1000 years earlier, the
founder of a new religion, Muhammad, would butcher and torture to death anyone
who disagreed with him or mock his beliefs, as reported in the Islamic holy
scriptures (the various “ahadith”). Muhammad’s way of dealing with dissent is,
unfortunately, followed in our times by fanatics of Islam, who murder those who
disagree with them or criticize their religion. In general, the idea of “death
for disagreement” seems to be one of the ways in which religion copes with
dissent; another, milder punishment, has been the excommunication from the
Church — especially in Christianity.

Interestingly, the idea that there are no absolute certainties
in science is not always fully appreciated by scientists who have only a
superficial
scientific training. For example, suppose that we let free a body heavier than
the air near the surface of the Earth. What is our certainty that — banning a
magician’s act or other trickery — the body will fall downward? One who is not
well versed in the philosophy of science might answer that we have a 100%
certainty that the body will move downward (toward the center of the Earth)
because of “the law of gravity” — thinking that a “law” of physics cannot be
violated. But in reality we are not allowed to have such an absolute certainty. Our certainty is
extremely high, bolstered by all the objects that fall downward daily, as well
as the many more objects that simply stay put on the surface of the Earth and
don’t suddenly shoot themselves in a random direction toward the outer space;
and yet, our certainty cannot — should not — be absolute. A “law” of physics is only our temporary
shorthand description of
a large number of observations (an extremely large number, in the case of
gravity), and as such it might be found to be incomplete in the future. After
all, the law of gravity itself, as expressed by Newton, was later found to be
incomplete by Einstein, who expressed it in more accurate terms. This does not
mean that, according to Einstein, an object let free can move not downward but
in another direction; but it does imply that we only have a “not yet falsified”
mathematical expression, which we call a “law” (of gravity). In principle, it might be that under certain
unknown and not-yet-experienced conditions, gravity can be locally “reversed”
and objects can fly away from the planetary center. No one can ever be absolutely
sure about anything in science, which is an empirical business, meaning
that it is based on observations, not on immutable “laws”.

A third fundamental idea follows logically from the above, and
differs between science and religion: it says that in science we must seek the falsification of every theory, rather than
merely its support by evidence. In contrast, in religion, neither the support,
nor — much less — the falsification of beliefs is sought; beliefs are simply
given, and remain unquestionable. (When there is “internal” questioning
and an attempt for even a mild change of beliefs, the minority opinion is termed
a “heresy”, and the dogma-changers “heretics”; whereas when people outside of
the specific religion pose questions, they are simply called “unbelievers”.)

Given the above observations regarding the fundamental
principles on which science and religion take diametrically opposite positions,
one wonders how it can be that some people — whether trained in science,
religious, or both — see no conflict and no overlap between the two domains.
(E.g., see Gould’s idea of NOMA’s — Non-Overlapping Magisteria — in §3.1.) For
example, religion makes some claims about nature: how the world was made, when
it was made, how humans and all living beings were created, and so on. Religion
starts from beliefs, which are enshrined in “holy books”. Science also makes
claims about nature, but it starts from observations, and reaches conclusions
that, at least on a first reading, seem different from those of religions. Some
religious people claim that some parts of science are wrong (e.g., the theory of
evolution); others try to interpret their holy books so that they do not
conflict with the scientific observations — a not-so-easy endeavor, with no
universally accepted solutions. But, as long as there is discussion, no
one should deny that a conflict exists. As another example: religion is
still considered, by many, as the only authority on moral values, the idea being
that morality comes from God. Yet scientists, in our times, have started
questioning this received wisdom, and explore the origin of morality, finding it
elsewhere; specifically, in nature (see §2.1; also, see Sam Harris’s “The Moral
Landscape” [31]). How can we deny that there is a conflict here? A third example
concerns the notion of “soul”, which is of fundamental importance to most
religions. According to many religions, souls keep existing after death, and/or will be summoned during
an ultimate “Judgment Day”, or will enter and live in different humans or animals in the
future, and so on. But science, and specifically cognitive science, explores
human cognition and finds a different “story” as more plausible: what we
perceive as “soul” is an emergent property of a single, but extremely complex,
self-referring concept: the concept of “self”. (E.g., see Douglas Hofstadter’s
“I Am a Strange Loop” [29].) How can there be no conflict when science (some
relevant disciplines of it, anyway) and religion (almost all of it) disagree on such a
fundamental idea, such as the nature of “soul”?

I think that to deny the existence of not just conflict, but
conflicts between science and religion requires us to be
self-blindfolded, or uninformed, or both. And I state this not because my
thought is imbued by a polemical attitude, but because I do not find it fair to close my eyes to
the existence of opposing views and their consequent contradictions.

This topic will be further developed in the future like
the rest, but meanwhile the reader is referred to a separate
discussion of it in this page by
the same author.

5. Dangers from Science

5.1 Is Science Another Religion?

5.2 A Thought Experiment: What if
Religion Vanishes and Science Remains?

Footnotes (clicking on the caret (^) on the
left of the footnote brings back to the text)

(^)
Yes, yes, I know, some religious people believe that the whole
world was created some 10,000 years ago. Others admit that the
Earth was created around 4.5 billion years ago, as modern science
assures us, but that our species is at most 10,000 years old;
thus they accept science where it doesn’t matter much to them,
but reject it where they think it doesn’t suit them. (I’ve
had lengthy discussions with such people in the past, so I have a
first-hand experience of conversing with those who accept science
selectively.) For those whose temporal horizons of the past are
shrunk like that... what can I say... they’ll get over it.
People in the past have believed much more incredible things:
that the Earth is flat, that it is at the center of the universe,
that the heaven is a crystalline dome that holds and separates
“the waters which [were] under the firmament” from those
below it, and so on. Eventually the scientific knowledge becomes
the layperson’s knowledge, but it takes whole centuries for
that to happen.

(^)
Muslims have expressed to me the opinion that the Allah of Islam
is a better-conceived notion (“more perfect”) than the
Christian God, because Allah has no gender, is neither Man nor
Woman. Yes, it might be true that Allah has no gender in a Muslim’s
mind, but this might be a simple consequence of the fact that
Arabic, the language of the Koran (Qur’an), as well as nearly
every language where the Islamic religion dominates, does not
have grammatical genders. Thus, Muslims are not in need to say He
or She when referring to Allah, because the concept of
grammatical gender does not exist in most of the languages they
speak. But most Christians speak Indo-European languages, which
happen to have an obligatory grammatical gender, forcing the
speaker to use a pronoun with gender, such as He or She. (The
option “It” for languages with a neuter gender would be
considered disrespectful when applied to God.) As a case in
point, in Modern Greek, even proper names require a definite
article with gender; so, Muslims who speak Greek are forced to
say “o Allah” (“the [masc.] Allah”), using the masculine
article, because omitting the article means speaking
ungrammatical Greek, and choosing the feminine article (“i”)
or the neuter one (“to”) seem even worse options. Thus, the
issue of God’s gender is largely of linguistic nature, and
should not be a reason for bragging about one’s own religion.

(^) It was brought to my
attention that some people
use the word “religion” so as to include even non-believers.
For example, they claim that atheists and even agnostics
are religious, as long as they hold some opinion about the
existence, or non-existence, or even ignorance of
existence, of God. In other words, whether you like it or not,
you are religious. They do this by applying their own definition
of the concept “religion”. Some people enjoy playing the “what
is your definition?” game. I would like to make it clear that I
do not find the discussion on the definition of religion
particularly productive or illuminating. There are some so-called
definitions that end up defining as religious only those people
who subscribe to a particular creed (e.g., Christianity). Other
“definitions”, as I mentioned, are so inclusive that they
include practically every set of beliefs as a religion. What good
is a definition that includes everything? I think that the only
purpose of an all-inclusive “definition” is to satisfy the
religious person’s ego in being able to claim, “Ha! See? Even
those who say they are non-believers, are actually believers!”
I find this attitude merely childish. A better view toward a
definition of religion is described here,
where a list of criteria for characterizing a set of beliefs as
religion is provided (from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy),
suggesting that some belief systems might satisfy some, a few,
one, or none of the criteria. Thus there can be a gradation to
how much a belief system qualifies as a religion.

(^)
How do we know this? There is no direct evidence that no animal
other than humans can conceive of the remote future, because it
is extremely hard to set up a cognitive experiment in which a
task is repeated, e.g., once every two years, and test whether
some animal learned to anticipate the future occurrence of the
event after some decades of training. (Who
could be the researcher that would receive a grant for this sort
of never-ending research! However, this doesn’t mean that
research on this subject through different means is absent.[23])
But an indirect argument seems to be persuasive: animal species
do not develop abilities just for the fun of it, but because
there is some environmental pressure that causes them to evolve
so as to acquire the ability and survive in spite of the
pressure. (This is true of every living kind, not just animals.)
For example, giraffes got their long necks not because they enjoy
watching the world from high, but because the vegetation they
feed on in the African savannah includes some very tall trees,
and giraffes specialized in feeding on those. Now, there does not
seem to exist some physical event that repeats periodically on
our planet with a period longer than a year and shorter than an
animal’s life, the perception of which would be beneficial for
the survival of the animal. Even aperiodic events, such as the
randomly timed deaths of relatives and peers, do not seem to
work: how would an animal benefit and leave more descendants by
knowing that its peers will die some time in the remote future?

Here is a hypothetical concrete example: there are some
cicadas, such as Magicicada septendecim, which
appear once every 17 years in some places in North America;
if there were some brainy apes living in places where these
cicadas appear, and the apes fed on them, perhaps this would
be an example of an environmental pressure for the apes that
could cause them to evolve so as to conceive of the remote
future, with a temporal horizon of at least 17 years; but
there are no apes other than humans, nor other indigenous
brainy animals in the New World.

Thus, there is no environmental pressure to cause an animal
with sufficiently large brain to need to think about the remote
future. As for humans, we must have developed our ability to
conceive of the remote future as an “added bonus” — if it
can be called a bonus at all, causing us the fear of death —
because we developed other, more fundamental cognitive abilities.

(^)
Or, if you will, the explanation exists, but it is probabilistic,
and usually beyond the layperson’s grasp. If you toss a coin
1000 times, chances are that you’ll get approximately 500 “heads”
and 500 “tails”. Let’s say that “heads” is good, e.g.,
you receive one meal for each “heads”, whereas “tails” is
bad: you pay one meal per “tails”. Overall, after 1000 tosses
of the coin, chances are that either you receive a small number
of meals (you are a bit “lucky”), or you administer a small
number of meals (a bit “unlucky”). But if 1000 people repeat
the same experiment, chances are that one or two of them will get
a very small number of “tails” and mostly “heads”: they
will be the very lucky ones; likewise, one or two people will get
a large number of “tails” (the unfortunate ones). The larger
the sample of people, the greater the chance that there will be
some very unlucky person, maybe someone who would need
to pay in meals more than this person’s entire property. In a
community of 1,000,000 people, you and others would be talking
with pity about the misfortune that befell that poor fellow, and
would be trying in vain to find an explanation in terms other
than the theory of probabilities. But there is no need for
another explanation. All one needs to understand is elementary
probabilities, and how the dice of life happen to be sometimes
too good, and sometimes too bad, for a few people. Our attention
is usually focused on those few, and we ignore the bulk of those
with less spectacularly good or bad luck.

(^) God
was good for us of course, the believers, the authors of the
story. For the others, our God would annihilate them without
further notice. The morals in those times were such that the
ancient Jews could not find any fault with the idea that “our
God is helping us to wipe out a neighboring tribe, including
their newborn babies, their mothers, and elder people”. So they
attributed their ancient genocidal acts to their God. The notion
that God cannot be so mean to kill the infidels — or help us
kill them — is too modern, and has not even been digested very
well by all people on this planet, since genocides in the name of
a god continue to happen. More on the evolution of morality in this subsection.

(^)The creation myths of most ancient religions
appear naïve to rational thought. For example, the ancient Greek
creation myth talks of an initial void, in which there was only
Nyx (Greek for “Night”), personified as a bird with black
wings. Nyx then laid a golden egg, out of which came Eros, the
god of love, etc., etc. But who created Nyx? Where did that
come from? Similarly, the ancient Jewish creation myth (inherited
by Christianity, and copied inaccurately by Islam), starts with
God, who created the heaven and the earth. But who created God?
Where did that come from? Contrary to common sense,
adherents of Judaism and its descendant religions do not seem to
even consider this as a logical question. Now, one might think
that it is only the religious mind that falls into the trap of
believing that there is a total explanation of creation, when in
reality no explanation can be self-sufficient (since every
explanatory system must be based on some initial assumptions).
However, even modern scientists do not seem to be immune to this
mental glitch. Theoretical physicists, for example, seek the
ultimate formula that would explain everything — a “theory
of everything”. But what would explain the properties of the
fundamental elements in such a formula? This question is further
discussed in this page of mine.

(^)Contradictions exist, for example, where religious
texts report information that contradicts modern science.
Anticipating the fervent protest and rejection of this idea by
some religious readers, I will only make a short list (for
brevity) of such contradictions, restricting myself to Genesis of
the Old Testament, and pointing out that what is interesting is
not so much the existence of the contradictions themselves (they
can only be expected, since the texts were written by ancient
peoples lacking modern knowledge), as the eagerness with which
the religious mind is self-blindfolded, being in denial of the
existence of contradictions, and finding the most ridiculous and
irrational “explanations” for why these are not
contradictions, after all. My short list follows:

Right from the start, God creates some
things out of order: specifically, first the Earth (Gen
1:1-2, first “day”) and then — much later — the
stars (Gen 1:14-15, fourth “day”), whereas it is now
common knowledge that stars predated our Earth, Sun, and
solar system by several billion years.

During the second “day”, God creates
the “firmament” (Gen 1:6), which he calls “Heaven”
(Gen 1:8), in order to divide the waters which were under
the firmament, from the waters which were above the
firmament (Gen 1:7). Here, the ancient Jewish world-view
is so transparent: the firmament/heaven is a dome that
separates the waters under it (the oceans and seas) from
the waters above it; that’s why the sky is blue folks,
because there are waters above the firmament; and when it
rains, obviously it is those waters that pour down on
earth (as confirmed in the deluge story, Gen 7:11, where
it is said that the aqueducts of the sky were opened).
Yet this so patently obvious — and cute! — ancient
interpretation of the natural world is vehemently denied,
or at best ignored, by the present-day staunch believers
of the Jewish and Christian religion.

God creates grass, other plants, and even
fruit trees (Gen 1:11-12, third “day”) before the Sun
(Gen 1:16-17, fourth “day”). How could plants survive
and grow for a whole “day” without sunlight, unless
the so-called “day” was literally a 24-hour period,
or a very short interval of time? (But that would
contradict most of scientific knowledge, since we know
that the world wasn’t created in a few days, but in
around 13 billion years.) A religious fundamentalist once
offered to me the “explanation” that the light that
nurtured the plants in day three was the ambient light
created in day one, which in turn was presumably the
light created during the early stages of the Big Bang.
Such “explanations”, though sounding impressive to
the layperson, are totally lacking in scientific basis:
by the time our planet was formed, the ambient light of
the Big Bang had already turned to radiation that’s
invisible to the eye, and unsuitable for causing
photosynthesis in the chloroplasts of plants.

The very creation of the grass, shrubs,
and trees, contradicts what we now know: God did not need
to resort to a miracle, creating plants in some special
way, because nature has a very effective and natural
(as opposed to supernatural) way by which it brought them
forth: plants evolved from bacterial life. In
some countries, e.g., in the U.S.A., religious
fundamentalists spend an unbelievable amount of energy
trying to refute the scientifically obvious: that
evolution happened (and keeps happening). This attitude
of religion against science has occurred repeatedly in
the past, most notably when the Christian Church burned
people on the stake for opposing the official view of the
Church that the Earth is at the center of the world, and
the Sun, Moon, and other bodies orbit the Earth. (How
many times does religion need to be proved wrong before
religious fundamentalists finally get it that they are
the wrong sort of folks for issuing judgments regarding
the natural world?)

Nor do stars require any special
(miraculous) way in order to form; we now know exactly
how they are formed, by the laws of physics (see here). Also, the stars were not created once and for
all during some “day”, as the Genesis text suggests,
but kept being formed throughout the “creation”,
unabated. Stars are being formed even today (unabated),
nearly in every corner of our galaxy (as in every
galaxy), and one can view spectacular pictures
of stars at every stage during their formation, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Thus, the idea that there was a specific time
at which the stars were created is completely out of
touch with reality.

A reader expressed the objection that
the Hebrew verb used for “created” is bara´,
an imperfect indicative active, thus indicating an action
that began in the past and still continues... God keeps
creating (even stars), according to this reader. But the
problem is not with the tense and aspect of some verbs in
Genesis. The reader misses two points: first, if God
created and keeps creating, then what sense does it make
to pinpoint the star creation at a specific “day”,
such as the fourth one? Why not the first (as would be
more fitting, since of all things mentioned in Genesis 1,
star formation is a process as old as nearly the entire
universe)? And second, does God really create stars? Why
would anyone who has understood the physical processes
behind star formation believe that God does it? Does any
educated person today believe that God creates the
raindrops? No, right? Then why would God create “gravity-drops”,
or stars, as we commonly call them? Of course, if one
doesn’t know much about clouds, what they are, and
under what conditions raindrops are formed, one is prone
to attribute rain to God (“If, then, you truly heed
my commandments [...] I will give the seasonal
rain to your land, the early rain and the late rain [...]”
[Deut. 11:13–14]). Similarly, today there are many
people who have no idea how stars are formed, so they
attribute their creation to God. Please read at least the
explanation of how stars are formed in the present text,
in this
section.

God creates animals only during the fifth
and sixth “day” (Gen 1:20-25), whereas plants were
already present since the third “day” (see above).
But we know that plants and animals evolved essentially
together out of microbial life: photosynthetic eukaryotic
(= “with nucleus”) cells made up colonies that became
the precursors of the first plants; at nearly the same
geological time, “animal” protists (eukaryotic cells
living by attacking and engulfing other cells) formed
colonies, the precursors of the first animals. Clearly,
to claim that a whole “day” (the fourth) intervened
between plants and animals (a day involving the creation
of stars, Sun, and Moon, to boot), is a gross
contradiction with modern knowledge.

God creates even whole classes of animals
in the wrong order: the serpents (reptiles) are created
in “day” six (Gen 1:24-25), but the birds, which we
know evolved from the reptiles some time in the upper
Jurassic period, are created in “day” five (Gen
1:20-21).

(^)An example of modern, and even dangerous religious
nonsense, is the position of the Catholic Church that
contraceptive devices (condoms) should not be used, because they
work against God’s order to humankind to multiply; never mind
that this religious directive acts as a death squad, sending
human beings to their death by AIDS (see more in another footnote(*)). Nonsense in the Islamic world includes (but is not
limited to) the treatment of women, who, in countries such as
Saudi Arabia, cannot vote, cannot drive, cannot be educated
formally, cannot go out of their home without being escorted by a
man, when they do so they have to be dressed like a sack of
potato, and are severely punished if any part of their body is
revealed in public; in addition, the testimony of two women in
court is equal to the testimony of a single man.

(^) Not to be confused with
the more common use of the term “intellectualism”, meaning
the devotion to and praise of the powers and development of the
intellect, which is strongly associated with “elitism”. This
has caused the emergence of the movement of “anti-intellectualism”,
which is synonymous with “egalitarianism”. All this is
unrelated to the notion of anthropological intellectualism.

(^) For philosophers, perhaps
this is a problem to ponder on. For cognitive scientists,
however, I beg to disagree. Being a cognitive scientist, I don’t
want to give the impression that I react as en expert who feels
compelled to give an answer even though he doesn’t have one,
but this problem in cognitive science is really elementary. The
problem exists only when we mix up the software and hardware
levels of description. Think of the computer analogy. A program
can cause a peripheral device of the computer to move (e.g., a
printer, a hard disk), and if the program is sophisticated
enough, it can do this without having been explicitly programmed
by the programmer. (The head of my computer’s hard disk moves
at unanticipated intervals all the time, without my direct
control of it, and its motions are meaningful, not erratic.) How
can the immaterial software move anything physical? Well, if we
stay at the level of software of course we have a conundrum. But
the software that does this has a hardware correlate:
the bits of information that are physically realized in terms of
zeros and ones in the computer’s memory. Bits are both software
(0 and 1, abstractly) and
hardware (whichever physical way they are realized in a computer
chip, or CD/DVD). It is the hardware bits that make the computer
peripheral move, and it is the organization of the bits, along
with the supplied electrical power, that cause the peripheral to
move in a meaningful way. Similarly, thoughts have correlates in
the neurons of the brain, though the neuronal correlates are
probably even more non-obvious and opaque than the hardware bits.
It is the neurons that move the arm of a person, and it is their
organization that makes such a motion meaningful to us.

(^) Exactly the opposite is
true: mountains are the “wrinkles” of our planet precisely at
the places where it trembles and shakes: in the vicinity of
current or prehistoric seismic faults, where the tectonic plates
meet; but Muhammad and his followers did not live in Australia or
Siberia to realize that the Earth is mountain-less exactly where
earthquakes are practically never felt.

(^) Unsurprisingly, most
Americans do not seem to be aware of this feature of their
culture, judging from my personal experience with them. Some
examples of black-and-white thinking in American life are the
following:

There is Good and Evil in the world. We
are on the side of Good, and we have some traditional
allies on our side (losing them one by one recently, for
unknown reasons). All others are on the side of the Evil,
represented by the Axis of Evil: North Korea, Iran, and
Syria, as our President declared in 2005. (The list can
change in time, but it is imperative that there be a
list of Evil-doers).

Our President said it eloquently,
immediately after 9/11: “Either you are with us, or you
are against us!”

Every person can be assigned a proper
race: either someone is White, or Black, or Hispanic, or
Asian, etc. So we can always tick in the appropriate box
on forms when we are asked to supply our racial
background.

Every person can be assigned a proper
gender: male, or female (so no problem again ticking the
appropriate box). Never mind that there are transgender
people, who may think that their bodies disagree with the gender to
which they feel they belong; or asexual people, who cannot (or feel
reluctant to) assign themselves to either of the two
biological sexes; or hermaphroditic people; and more.

Every living being either has a soul or
lacks one.

After death, the soul goes either to
Paradise or to Hell.

Either you win a championship, or you don’t.
Nobody ever remembers those who competed for the second
or third place. Besides, when you enter a competition,
you enter in order to win, not simply to
compete. (What a ridiculous idea, “simply to compete”
— ha, ha!)

In life, there are two kinds of people:
the winners, and the losers. Either you work hard in your
life to be with the winners, or you don’t, and you
become one of the losers. What would you like to be,
kiddo, winner or loser?

For a concrete example, consider this one: in
2004, a 12-year-old boy in Ohio won the right in court to wear a
T-shirt to school bearing the words “Homosexuality is a sin,
Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black
and white!” (In [13], p. 23.) There
are more examples, but this is not a survey on the American
psychology, so I’ll cut the list short. And, no, I didn’t get
the above ideas about Americans “from the movies”, as a
correspondent of mine thought. First, I seldom watch movies, and
second, I got my ideas by direct observation, having lived for
over a decade in the U.S. However, if you are an American, you
don’t necessarily need to be pigeonholed into the stereotype
that I describe above. There are always exceptions to the rules.

(^) I put the word “want”
in quotes because, naturally, memes do not have any volition;
they do not really seek anything, any more than real viruses seek
anything. But the functioning of viruses makes them appear as
if they want to spread and infect people. A virus doesn’t
have a brain, it’s a tiny scrap of DNA. But evolution has honed
viruses so that, e.g., some of them cause us to sneeze, so they
look as if they do everything they can to transfer their
residence from person to person (because those viruses that didn’t
do such tricks, aren’t around — they have been eliminated by
natural selection). Similarly, a meme doesn’t need to think “I
want to be transmitted” — it can’t think anything. But some
sort of natural selection has kept in our minds those memes that
are good at being copied from mind to mind. Those memes that are
not good at that are absent from our minds, since we didn’t
receive them from others. So, memes too, like viruses and genes,
appear as if they have volition.

(^) And because the world is large, and statistically every
possible aberration will be observed given a large enough sample,
please don’t write to me bringing to my attention some idiot
atheist’s attempt to organize a mission, if there is any. Don’t
lose sight of the forest, focusing on the tree. One exception
will not suffice to annul the rule, which is that traditionally
missionaries are religious.

(^) One might claim that the
20th C. communist regimes could qualify as institutions that
sought the spread of atheism. There is a bit of truth, and a lot
of detachment from reality with this idea. Communist regimes —
specifically the metropolis of them all, the Soviet Union —
sought to advance communism, not atheism. The latter was
only the official dogma, a reaction to organized religion that
the Bolsheviks in tsarist Russia had fought against. Also, the
theoreticians of communism, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, had
expressed their views against religion, so atheism was adopted as
somehow the only officially possible stance against religion. But
communists did not organize missions in Africa, for example,
trying to convince African tribes that they should convert to
atheism. Wherever “people’s republics” were established in
Africa or Asia back then, atheism played essentially no role,
because local tribes retained their local religions. (After all,
tribe leaders established those “people’s republics” so
that they could receive financial support from the Soviet Union,
not because they had any ideological attachment to communism.)

(^) But if atheists are not
interested in spreading their ideas, what am I doing here? Am I
not spreading my “viruses”? I hereby sincerely affirm that
spreading my ideas is not my purpose in writing the present text.
If there is any spreading, I apologize — it should be construed
only as a side effect. As I explained in the introduction, my
purpose is to put my thoughts about religion in some coherent
order, in an effort to understand the cognitive
phenomenon of religion. (Recall that I am a cognitive scientist
by profession, which I hope explains my interest.) I uploaded
this text in the Internet seeking feedback from various sources
— both believers and non-believers — not attempting to “convert”
anyone to atheism. Personally I find the idea of preaching for
conversion abominable.

(^) And this is very important, because measuring the age
of fossils and the age implied by differences in the DNA
structure are two independent methods. Whenever two
independent scientific methods converge to roughly the same
answer, this lends much stronger support to the conclusion than
either one of the methods would provide in isolation.

(^) However, Joe did not have
a clue about the actual number. He simply believed that it’s
not just a few thousand years, or better yet, he believed he had
no objection to the age of the Earth as announced by scientists.
But when I asked him exactly how old he thought the Earth is, he
estimated it to be some tens of thousands of years. Upon pointing
out to him that it is actually around 4.5 billion years old, he
replied, “Oh, well...” — with a taunted expression on his
face, which I interpreted to mean, “Who cares... some tens of
thousands, a few billion — what difference does it make?”.
Like every good creationist, he was oblivious to the fact that
even to begin to find evolution possible, familiarity with the
actual age of the Earth makes all the difference in the world.

(^) It’s not just religions that failed to guess
correctly the location of our origin; some scientific theories
were not much more successful either. Lacking the evidence that
accumulated recently, there was (in the 2nd half of the 20th
century, and still appears in many textbooks) the theory of multiregionalism,
according to which each type of people (Europeans, Asians,
Africans, etc.) evolved independently from earlier, ancestor
types of humans (the Homo erectus kind), and through
interbreeding. The way I understand it, multiregionalism implies
that our kind, H. sapiens, and the ancestor kind H.
erectus are actually one and the same species! Otherwise how
could the various H. erectus individuals in Asia,
Africa, and Europe, evolve independently into the same
kind of animal, the modern H. sapiens? There is not a
single similar evolutionary example in the biological world. So,
either we, humans, are somehow biologically special (able to
evolve independently into the same species from geographically
distant populations of an ancestor species — an impossible
hypothesis), or H. sapiens is not really a new species
but the same species as H. erectus, a conclusion that
simply pushes the question of the origin of our species back in
time by about 1.5 million years. However, multiregionalism is not
supported sufficiently anymore by the paleoanthropological and
molecular-biological evidence.[7][8][9][10][11][30]

(^) The depth of the Red Sea
at the Strait of Bab el Mandeb is deep enough to guarantee that
it has always been a water strait, never converted to a land
passage, even when the sea level was at its lowest (e.g., during
glaciation periods, when large masses of water were accumulated
on the poles). Also, we know that our ancestor species H.
erectus did not possess the necessary skills to build rafts
and travel any significant length over the sea. For example, H.
erectus reached the islands of Indonesia (hence the “Java
Man” fossils) because there were times during which the sea
level had dropped, turning many Indonesian islands into parts of
a connected land mass; so H. erectus individuals could
walk over the land, but never managed to cross the Timor Sea,
which separates Australia from Indonesia, and remained always a
body of water.

(^) I use the term “farming” and “agriculture”
interchangeably and in the general sense, which includes animal
husbandry.

(^) However, just because most
people in the world today would loathe to see the bodies of their
relatives being consumed by scavengers does not mean that all
cultures on the planet think the same. In Tibet, for example, a
traditional way for dispensing the dead body is to leave it in
the open for vultures to consume it, a practice known as “sky burial” (warning: the reader is advised not
to follow the previous link if s/he suspects s/he would feel
uncomfortable reading the article of the encyclopedia; at the
very least, read the following explanation first). This practice
is not without justification, and does not mean that
Tibetans do not believe in the afterlife. It is precisely because
they believe that the soul has departed from the body, that they
regard the body as a lifeless object, and deem it best that it be
returned to nature, where it originated from. Seen from the
proper perspective, the practice makes rational sense, and cannot
be relegated simply as “barbaric”. (Tibetans might think
that, instead, the Western practice of burial is barbaric, for
reasons that I do not need to explain, but are within everybody’s
reach.) Thus, we see that avoidance of burial (as well as
cremation) does not imply that some culture does not hold beliefs
about the afterlife.

(^) This legend, which sounds
so much like a plagiarism of the Great Flood of the Hebrews, is
at least as old as the Jewish legend, so it is not possible to
say which was plagiarizing which. More likely, none of
the two is a plagiarism of the other. Mythological stories were memes
floating among ancient cultures, through their mutual
interactions. Thus, the Great Flood legend is found in the
mythologies of several ancient peoples. Another Great Flood
legend, most probably predating the Hebrew and Greek legends, and
with many similarities to both, is the story of
Ut-Napishtim in the Babylonian epic of
Gilgamesh, ca. 2100 BCE.

(^) Some readers might object
to my use of the term “Muslim nation”. Indeed, there are some
nations, such as Nigeria, with a population split between Muslim
and Christian beliefs. Also, there is one nation with
predominantly Muslim population, Turkey, in which the death
penalty has been abolished (though openly criticizing Allah, the
Koran, or Muhammad in Turkey is not the wisest thing to do).
However, in most other nations with Muslim populations, such as
the Arabic countries, Iran, Pakistan, etc., speaking against
Islam does incur the death penalty (so nobody does it), and that
is what I mean by “Muslim nations”.

(^) Today, when it is people
who perpetrate such an act, we call it a genocide. But
when it is God who does it, then it’s called “Divine Justice”.

(^) Why is this story, in my
opinion, morally unacceptable? Because it is perceived as horrendously
frightening by some children: it ruins their trust in their
parents, which hasn’t become rock-solid yet with all the things
we learn about our parents later in life. I am speaking from
personal experience: I admit I had a hard time swallowing this
story as a 7-year-old child, the time when I first read it, and I’m
sure I wasn’t the only child in the world who had this
reaction. I identified of course with poor Isaac, and couldn’t
digest the idea that a father could raise a knife and slaughter
his own little son — and this was presented as virtuous
in the book! Really, is it a virtue to agree to slaughter your
child because the Führer of your tribe asked you to do so? When
the young mind is still uninjured by the religious infection it
can see this act for what it is: the molesting of a powerless and
inferior (child Isaac) by the powerful and superior (father
Abraham, or even God himself, since he gave this horrible command
to Abraham). That was the first time I felt something is deeply
rotten in the book my parents gave me to read.

(^) Genocidal: Gen 6:5-8:22, Gen 19:12-28, Num 31:1-10;
Josh 6:13-27; misogynist: Gen 19:8, Jdg 11:30-40, Jdg 19:23-29;
jealous bigot: Exd 34:14. These are not the only derogatory
epithets that befit the O.T. God, but I don’t want to appear as
if I am motivated by ulterior motives of hatred against religion,
so I include here only what can be indisputably(*) attributed
directly by the biblical text. (*) Indisputably only if one’s
mind is not infected by the religious memes, which have the
capacity to make one see black as white, and vice versa — more
about this in §3.3.

(^) This statement is meant to
be understood as applying only at the interpersonal level (among
individuals), not at the international one (among nations). For
example, at the time of this writing, European nations (including
some that are aspiring members of the European Union) have
abolished the death penalty; the United States, however,
regularly executes criminals on its own soil (the U.S. is among
the champions in capital punishment, together with China, Iran,
and North Korea), and non-American civilians elsewhere in the
world (e.g., most recently in Iraq, under the pretext of
warfare). Apparently, the average American does not feel immoral
or even responsible for the human lives lost due to their nation’s
offenses against other nations, or for the ease by which
convicted fellow Americans are executed; but they do employ
modern morality when it comes to interpersonal relations.

(^) This is not meant to be
interpreted as saying that every member of her culture is
arrogant. Clearly, there are many humble Americans, and I have
had the pleasure to interact with quite a few of them over the
years, including some of my best friends. The characterization
“arrogant culture” should be construed only in a statistical
way.

(^) I call circular reasoning the attempt to explain
morality through morality (ours through God’s). One might claim
this is not circular reasoning, strictly speaking. Okay, but it
is logically very unsatisfying, unconvincing reasoning. It’s
like trying to explain the shaking of the earth during
earthquakes through the shaking of an underground deity who
occasionally sneezes. The question is whence cometh
morality; not our human morality, but morality in general. When they tell
me: “Morality comes from God”, they explain to me the origin of human
morality, but not of morality in general, because they have no idea why God
is moral and not immoral; they simply take it as an axiomatically accepted fact
that God is moral.

(^) Okay, fine, there is also
the possibility that God could be indifferent to evil or its
absence, or that he could display a mild interest in morality
(like Zeus, for example), and so on. My purpose here is not to
examine all possibilities exhaustively, but to present the
diametrically opposite alternative to the predominant religious
view of today, which admits only one possibility: that God is
good.

(^) Sometimes it is possible
to prove mathematically a few properties (usually trivial,
though) of chaotic systems, but much more commonly, proofs are
impossible. In some cases it has been proven that such proofs are
impossible, so it is not merely our ignorance that prevents us
from finding a proof. There is a good chance that the property I
am interested in (whether species T would survive or be extinct)
is such a typical property of a chaotic system, lacking a proof,
because it is somewhat reminiscent of the “halting problem”,
a famous “undecidable” (provably unprovable) problem of
computability theory in computer science. In such cases, amassing
evidence by repeatedly running the simulation of the system is
the next best thing short of obtaining a proof.

(^) It might sound unrealistic
that plants don’t die; and yet, it isn’t. I could make each
plant stay at a location for a fixed number of epochs, then “give
birth” to another plant with similarly restricted lifetime at
another (random) location, and then die. But this is equivalent
to a plant that moves randomly in space. Because animals also
move randomly in space, it doesn’t make any difference after
all if the animals will find the plants at their original
locations or at different ones. This means that moving plants
around doesn’t add anything of interest to the system.

(^) For example, Richard
Dawkins was asked what in his opinion the origin of morality is,
during the question-answer session of the presentation of his
book, The God Delusion, in Lynchburg, Virginia. After
first offering his well-known explanation of altruism based on
the evolution of genes (see The Selfish Gene,[4]chapters 1 & 10), he ended up
admitting honestly: “I don’t know”. (The entire lecture can
be found online at this address.) In The Selfish Gene we read:

“I am not advocating a morality based on
evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not
saying how we humans ought to behave. [...] My own feeling is
that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of
universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society
in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may
deplore something, it does not stop it being true. [...] Be
warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which
individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a
common good, you can expect little help from biological
nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,
because we are born selfish.” (pp. 2-3.)

On the contrary, I believe that help in
understanding the origin of morality can come precisely
from biological nature. Dawkins didn’t see it because he has
focused on the leaves of the trees, and missed the forest.

(^) That species compete and
some of them become extinct because of competition is a moot
subject among biologists, but some evidence exists in favor of
answering in the affirmative. For example, it is well known that
marsupial mammals generally do not compete favorably against the
placental mammals. For this reason, marsupials have been
restricted mostly to the isolated continent of Australia, with a
few exceptions only in South and Central America (and the single
species of opossum in North America). Fossil evidence indicates
that South America was once inhabited only by marsupial mammals,
when the two Americas were disconnected. At that time (between
120 and 100 million years ago), South America, Antarctica, and
Australia were all connected, forming one gigantic southern
continent (what was left of the earlier and even larger continent
of Gondwana), where marsupials were the only mammals. Later, when
the isthmus of Panama was formed, placental mammals invaded South
America from the north, and marsupials essentially vanished in
the south — with only very few surviving in specialized niches,
including the opossum, which is a remnant of the marsupial
species of South America that migrated northward. Of course, the
American marsupials weren’t extinct because they became a meal
for the other ones, but because the placentals have better
specifications for survival in the same environments. (Meanwhile,
Australia was already disconnected from Antarctica, so its
marsupials were saved from the placental invasion.) Thus, what we
have here is an entire biological taxon competing
against another: the subclass Eutheria (placental
mammals) against the subclass Metatheria (marsupial
mammals). At the species level, whenever placentals such as
rabbits and foxes were introduced in Australia (by European
settlers), they displaced completely the corresponding native
marsupial species, and are now treated nearly as pests by the
Australians. The “battle” of placentals against marsupials,
although superficially appears unrelated to stealing and
morality, is a clear example of competition among species (or
even taxa) that can result in the survival of one at the expense
of another.

(^) For the occasional reader who is unfamiliar with this
issue, the Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms
during sexual intercourse, thus condemning to death by AIDS
thousands, if not millions of people, mainly in Africa and other
under-developed places. (See also this footnote.) The Catholic
Church’s rationale is that human beings should not intervene in
God’s will, and so should not kill sperms, each of which is a
potential human being. Unbelievable or not, the Catholic Church
gives more rights to sperms than to fully developed adults,
disregarding the fact that it’s not just sperms, but any
cell of the human body that has all the information and
potential in its DNA to become a human being. Come to think of
it, following the Catholic Church’s logic, every time you
scratch your head you commit a genocide of colossal proportions.

(^) Note that even the Levite’s
servant was saved from the ordeal, presumably because he
was male, and the old man’s maiden daughter was offered to the
hungry mob instead, along with the concubine. I suspect that the
ancient Jewish hierarchy in a household ran something like this:
first the male lord of the house, then the male children, then
the male servants, followed by the wives, female children, female
servants and concubines, asses, and oxen. (I am not sure whether
male asses and male oxen would be worth less than the wives and
other female property, though.)

(^) In
other words, Allah appears to give the following self-contradictory command: on
one hand, “do not exceed the limits”, i.e., do not retaliate in a manner harsher
than your enemy’s wrong-doing; and on the other hand, “kill them wherever you
find them [because] persecution is worse than slaughter.” Really? Is persecution
worse than slaughter? What would you prefer, to be persecuted, or to be killed?
I bet that every sane human being would prefer to live, even under a state of
persecution, rather than to be killed. So, either Allah made the incredibly
stupid statement that “persecution is worse than slaughter”, or that statement
was made by the illiterate “prophet”, the founder of Islam. In the first case,
Allah appears to contradict common sense, and so proves to be dumber than the
dumbest person. In the second case, Muhammad is simply wrong, for almost
everybody would prefer to live rather than die; therefore slaughter is worse
than persecution, therefore the Muslim who kills his enemy at war indeed exceeds
the limits, contradicting the Quranic command of 2:190.

(^)If
this “argument” hadn’t been posed by someone in an e-mail
exchange that I once had, I wouldn’t consider it worthy of
mention. And yet, someone suggested it in all seriousness! This
idea is reminiscent of the following situation: say that someone
that goes by the name of “Rasheed” is standing in front of a
mirror, wearing terribly wretched rugs, torn to pieces, full of
dirty spots. Suppose you tell him, “Take a look at yourself in
the mirror Rasheed: you’re full of dirt!” Then he becomes
indignant, and argues with you as follows: “Yes, but don’t
you see that there are also several clean spots? Why do you
disregard the clean spots when you say that my clothes are dirty?”

(^)It is interesting also that the
word “men” in “all men are equal” did not bother much
most people until very recently, when political correctness
prescribed the use of “people” or “humans” instead of “men”,
thus not excluding half of the human population. Still, many
people do not see any problem, insisting that the word “man”
in this case stands for all people; well, then, why not using “woman”
to stand for “people”? If you are a man, how would this sound
to you as a dictum: “All women are equal”, if you were told
that in this case the meaning of “woman” is “all people”?

(^) Social Darwinism is the misapplication of biological
(Darwinian) principles on human societies. Its only relation with
real Darwinism (i.e., with biological evolution through natural
selection) is the unwarranted use of Darwin’s name in its
title, as its principles are not biological (natural), but
human-made, suiting the needs of certain ideologies (usually
fascist), and conflict with evolutionary principles on several
counts (see this Wikipedia article for more details).

(^) I put “heart” in
quotes to avoid confusion with the real heart, which is nothing
more than a pump of the blood. I hope it is understood by all
readers that when we say “feel it with your heart”, we mean
“feel it with that part of your brain that deals with emotions”.
The true heart has nothing to do with feelings. Simply, when
certain feelings are involved, such as anger, fear, sudden love,
etc., there is a lot of activity in some regions of the brain,
which thus require more oxygen, and fast; the extra
oxygen can be fetched only through a larger quantity of blood
arriving in the brain per unit of time, which is accomplished by
a faster heartbeat. Thus, strong emotions in the brain can cause
the familiar flutter of the heart, which is what made people
attribute feelings to the blood pump ever since antiquity.

(^) It’s comical only for
our Western standards of knowledge, if any Westerner believes it
sincerely. Once a professor of mine told me that when he served
in a peace corps unit in Africa he met with tribes the people of
which believed that the Earth is flat. That’s not comical. It’s
not even “tragic”, if those people lived happy lives. It’s
just that, with the data that are available to them, they have no
reason to believe that the Earth is not flat. Ideas
start becoming ridiculous, bordering on the comical, when we have
accumulated enough knowledge and amassed enough evidence from
independent sources supporting the contrary view.

(^)
Jaynes suggested (in [28])
that ancient peoples, before some time around 3,000 years ago,
could not understand that the inner voice of their thoughts was
their own, because the right part of their brains was generating
voices which the left part was hearing, without the latter being
able to tell that such voices were coming from inside of the
person’s head. That’s because, according to Jaynes, the human
mind was split in two, in a “bicameral” state
(whereas today the minds of people are assumed to be in a “unicameral”
state). Jaynes cites evidence from literature: e.g., in Homer’s
epics, the poet asks the Muse to sing to him, and although today
most people understand a “Muse” to be a mere personification
of the ancient bard’s inspiration, Jaynes contended that the
ancients were actually hearing a voice — which they attributed
to a Muse — singing the poems to them. He says that more
evidence comes from passages in the Old Testament in which
ancient people lament the fact that the gods, who were speaking
to them until that time, later remained silent; which is
explained by Jaynes as indicating that the minds of those people
were passing from a bicameral into a unicameral state. In the
Iliad, and in entire passages of the Old Testament, there is no
sign that anything like the mental state of introspection was
going on. Jaynes concluded from such observations that ancient
people with a bicameral state of mind were not conscious!
This is the wackiest theory of consciousness I’ve ever heard.
First, why is the ability for introspection what determines consciousness?
According to Douglas Hofstadter,[29]
consciousness is present, even in a minute degree, when the
individual (which can be an animal, or a human infant) has the
ability to entertain an internal (mental) symbol that represents
the “self”. It can be a “little consciousness” if the
self-symbol is poorly connected to other symbols, or a “larger
consciousness” if the self-symbol is richly connected; and all
the in-between degrees of consciousness are possible. Thus,
consciousness varies in degree according to Hofstadter (and I can’t
agree more with him), it’s not an all-or-none phenomenon, which
makes people either fully conscious or zombies! But, leaving
aside Jaynes’s messing up with consciousness, even his idea
that people who would hear disembodied voices would attribute
them to a god, or gods, sounds silly to me. First, when I hear my
inner voice while thinking, it always sounds masculine (if not
exactly with my tinge of voice), I never hear a woman talking to
me! So I would never attribute that voice to a goddess. So, how
could men believe in the existence of goddesses, and women in the
existence of gods? (Let alone children, who should believe in the
existence of only kiddie-gods.) Second, and more important, I
never hear that voice pronouncing whole sentences. It almost
always stops in the middle of a thought, goes back, restates the
thing, stutters, changes its mind again... If I were to believe
that this is the voice of a god talking to me, then I’d
conclude this god is a stutterer, and moreover, he’s a complete
idiot, because he never manages to finish a full sentence. And
third, if Jaynes were right, there should be people existing
today — perhaps in remote hunter-gatherer societies — who
retain the old “bicameral” state of mental functioning, since
no sane thinker should expect that the entire world switched to
the “unicameral” state of mind, magically, about 3,000 years
ago. (What exactly would the cause of this global switch be?) Why
hasn’t any anthropologist found such tribes, whose members
report hearing voices? Yet Jaynes managed to write a whole book
about that idea, and had it published.

References (in order of appearance in the text; clicking on
the number brings you to the first point where the reference
appears in the text)